A Little Confusion About the Doors An Overlooked Detail About the Sizes

We made the major decisions about the windows and doors in December and received a cost estimate, but we hadn’t yet received a detailed spec sheet and the contract. That came today.

At first glance, all looked in order. Then I looked more closely at a drawing of the front of the house and noticed that the kitchen door was drawn as two panels, opening in the middle, rather than a single door hinged on the side. (This door is marked ③ in the drawing below.)

Then, looking at the back of the house, I noted that the three large doors, which we had been calling “French doors”, had three panels instead of two. That means that two of the doors need to fold together to completely open the door. (These doors are marked ⑤, ⑥, and ⑦ in the drawing below.)

In both views, the designs were what we’d seen before. I think I may have overlooked the specific door designs before because the drawing has exterior shutters, which we aren’t using, so I didn’t focus carefully on the doors themselves.

I wrote Kevin to ask him about these doors.

He said it all depends on the size of the openings and thus the needed size of the doors. The kitchen opening is 114cm (45in), so the spec sheet planned two doors with widths of 57cm (22.5in). Kevin said the maximum practical size for a single door is about a meter (40in). Get any larger and the door gets heavy and hard to keep in place, and since the doors open inward, the door takes a lot of space inside. He proposed that we narrow the opening slightly to 90-95cm (35-37in). Then we can use a single door. This solution also gives us a small amount of additional wall space inside. (Even at 90cm it’s a wide door. The front door in our house here in Wilmette is .)

Similarly, since the openings for the rear doors are 2.34m (7.5ft) wide, we can’t go with just two panels in each opening. We need to have three panels, each 78cm (30in — the standard US door size). These make for nice sized doors with lots of glass and when open and folded, don’t take too much space inside the room.

Here’s a photo of the three panel doors from Kevin’s house.

A remaining detail is the use of muntins on the doors. We want to divide the doors horizontally in four sections, the top three glass and the bottom one wood. (This will be similar to the windows, which we want to be divided horizontally in three sections.)

I realize that we need to have a dimensioned drawing of the windows and doors so we can understand and visualize the sizes of the various pieces and how they fit together as a whole.

The spec also included 9 total interior doors, but the plan only has 8.

Beyond these two issues, I had a number of small questions about the specs and the attachments.

Next step is to ask Kevin to get the supplier to provide the needed clarifications.

Budget Summary

Here’s a budget summary by component. It does not include installation, which is in the primary contractor budget, or taxes.

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