As I mentioned in September, the door out from the garage was desperately in need of replacement. So was the front door – in addition to the breeze I could feel coming in under the door on windy days, there was an increasing gap at the sides because the metal door had shrunk in the frame. Obviously, this is less than ideal, particularly in Chicagoland winters.
I did my due diligence, requesting multiple quotes for the two doors and storm doors. (That seems like a fancy name for screen doors, but they actually have glass that slides up, so it can be sealed in the winter.) One of the interesting things I encountered was that multiple vendors sold doors from the same regional producer, so I was able to do a direct comparison of that pricing.
The front door is fairly close to my large front windows, so I didn’t see a need to include a larger window in the door; the windows look out onto the path from the driveway already. Instead, I picked a similar window size to the existing door, but went with slightly decorative glass.
In addition to the locks on the normal doors, the storm doors include locks, which makes them ideal for leaving open as screen doors in the summer. The old doors were white on both sides. I decided the new doors should match the gutters and went with brown on the outside, but kept them white on the inside.
Next up on the home ownership front is a big decision… there is a leak somewhere in my radiator pipes, which are buried in the slab otherwise known as my foundation. I’m faced with the expensive process of trying to locate it – or paying someone to come “bleed” my pipes multiple times in the winter to get the air out, again – or replacing my boiler with a furnace and adding air-conditioning while I’m at it.