Material matters less than most door showrooms suggest. Fibreglass holds paint and shrugs off dents, steel is the cheapest way to get a solid, secure slab, and wood looks best and asks the most of you in maintenance. Any of the three will serve you well for decades. What separates a door that still shuts sweetly in five years from one that sticks every August is what happens underneath it.
A slab-only replacement — new door, existing frame — is cheaper and faster, and it is the right call when the existing jamb is sound, plumb and dry. It is the wrong call when the frame has rot at the bottom of the legs, which is exactly where frames rot, because the new slab then hangs off soft timber and drops out of alignment within a season or two. If the bottom six inches of the jamb are soft to a screwdriver, the frame goes too.
The threshold is the other half of it. An entry door sits at the one point in the wall where water, foot traffic and a temperature difference all meet. A sill that is pitched outwards, sealed to the subfloor and fitted with an adjustable threshold lets you take up the gap as the house settles, instead of stuffing draught excluder under the door every autumn.
Replacing a front or back door? Call Empire AH Home Improvement at (551) 219-7785 — we'll check the frame before quoting the door, so you find out now rather than after.
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