Doors and Hardware

During and after the interior stairs, we made incremental progress on the remaining interior finishes such as doors, hardware, light fixtures, etc. We also got started on figuring out what to do with the exterior stairs and decking above the garage. Little did I know that the "little" things would wind up being the most frustrating. The frustration was mostly due to the pace at which these tasks were completed. I'll save my venting for another post and get to the interesting and [hopefully] helpful things.

This post is going to focus on the doors. I may have already mentioned this in a previous post, but I want to re-iterate that when you want a certain finish, such as a stain, I found that showing the builder or painter a picture or sample is far from adequate. Every time I tried this approach I was met with the same reply, "Which stain is that?" How the hell would I know? Like you, I'm staring at the same picture out of a magazine that unfortunately doesn't have a caption that says "These cabinets where finished using Lookin' Good brand stains with their Radiant Sun #505 and then finished Silky Smooth brand varnishes." These guys are the professionals who do this literally every workday of the year and they want me to tell them EXACTLY what to use to get the finish I just showed them. <Sigh>. Fortunately, they are willing to stain a few samples for us to view, but when it comes to the doors, I don't have any extra stain grade solid core doors lying around to be used for experimentation. Off I go, again, to the store.

The doors we chose are solid core doors with stain grade birch on both sides. The big orange store sells birch plywood so I got a couple of small 2x2 pieces and tried a few stains before we finally decided on this:

After the stain, the doors were finished with a matte lacquer. They turned out very nice. Oh, and if you want to show this to a painter, let him know it's General Finishes Oil Based Gel Stain - New Pine. The lacquer is satin finish and I believe it was from Sherwin William.

The door hardware was a lot of work, but I saved a ton of money by spending numerous evenings surfing the through various styles and suppliers. We have three sliding barn style doors in the house and the sliding hardware is quite pricey. Most of what I found was over $1500 per set. At this point, we had no extra room in the budget and the solid core doors ate up the most of the door budget. I was able to find the slider above on eBay of all places. There was glass door company selling these and they accepted an offer of three sets for $290 each. Score! We used the same hardware for all three doors and the quality is better than I expected. Out of the box I was a little skeptical, but once we got them installed, they work great and the build quality is fine.

To add to the financial challenge, these doors really needed a large handle pull to look proportionally correct.With eight foot doors, anything under 24" was going to look rather small. I quickly discovered that these are quite pricey as well. Another couple of evenings on eBay saved the day. I got these out of Australia for about $150 a pair. They are designed to go on both sides, but you can easily adapt these to single sided use. Comparable pulls I found were in the $300-500 range for a pair.

For all the other door handles we settled on these Fusion levers. When you buy all your door hardware at once, try to find a place that will cut you a discount for a large order. I was able to save about $15 per lever set after negotiating.

In closing, you can spend as much or as little as you want on doors and hardware. I think doors are an item that you should start evaluating early. More than likely, they will cost you more than you'd like (especially the hardware), but if you invest some time in shopping around, you can save a lot money. So get started early on this part so you aren't pressured into spending more or getting something substandard. The best decision we made was to go with the solid core doors. It makes a huge difference in how the quality "feels." We get a lot compliments on the doors and they're only birch!