Doors, Locks & Carpentry in Wake Forest, NC

The storm door question

Wake Forest kept a historic core and had twenty years of subdivision building wrapped around it, and storm doors come up in both halves for different reasons.

They are a small, cheap addition, they genuinely help with draughts and with keeping a front door clean, and they have two complications people rarely hear about in the shop.

Heat build-up

A glazed storm door sits a few inches in front of the main door. On a sun-facing elevation, that gap becomes a small unventilated greenhouse.

The air temperature in there on a still summer afternoon gets considerably higher than the outside air, and the main door sits in it all day. On a dark-coloured timber door that is a real problem: paint blisters, joints open as the timber moves, and finishes fail years early.

Ways round it:

• Ventilated storm doors, with a screen option that lets air move through
• A lighter colour on the main door, which absorbs far less
• Not fitting one on a south or west-facing entrance, and putting it on a north-facing side door instead
• A fibreglass or steel main door, which does not care

Some manufacturers state this in their instructions and specifically exclude dark doors from warranty behind a storm door. It is worth reading before buying.

Approval

In Heritage, Wakefield and the newer developments generally, anything that alters the front elevation is likely to need architectural review, and storm doors are frequently named in the covenants with an approved style and colour.

It is one email to the management company. Committees often meet on a schedule rather than reviewing as things arrive, so it is worth starting before booking dates rather than after.

Screen and storm doors on the historic houses

Around the old centre the situation reverses. Many of those houses already have a wooden screen or storm door, and it is worth keeping.

Original doors of that type were made to the proportions of the entrance — the rail heights relate to the door behind, the frame is slim enough not to hide it, and the whole thing reads as part of the house. A modern full-view aluminium replacement in front of an original panelled door hides exactly the thing that gives the entrance its character.

Most failures are repairable:

Hinges that have sagged, so the door drops at the latch side and catches on the sill.

A frame racked out of square, which makes everything else worse. Squaring it up and adding a corner brace or a tension arrangement fixes it.

A closer that has lost its adjustment, so it slams or fails to latch. Almost always adjustable rather than broken.

Screen that has come loose. Screen is held in a groove by flexible spline. Old spline hardens and shrinks and loses grip, which is why a panel starts to sag. New mesh needs new spline — reusing hardened spline puts new screen into a groove that will not hold it.

A rotten bottom rail. End grain at the bottom of a door absorbs water fast and it is the part nobody paints. Where a door is otherwise good, a bottom rail section can be cut out and a new piece let in.

The main doors themselves

Paint build-up on older doors is dimensional. A dozen coats on the edge and a dozen on the jamb is a real thickness, and it is frequently the whole reason a door that fitted for decades now binds. Cleaning out the hinge mortices matters too — paint in the recess packs the hinge out from the jamb and shifts the whole door. Dealing with the paint is reversible; planing is not.

Where a house predates 1978 there is a lead question, and it is a preparation question: intact paint is not the hazard, dust is. Wet methods and containment rather than dry power sanding.

Original doors are worth keeping. Solid panel doors from that era are better made than most of what is available now, and mortise locks were designed to be serviced. Replacing one with a modern lockset means a large bore in a different position and a deep empty pocket in the door edge that has to be filled with a solid block.

In the newer developments, the ordinary list: seasonal binding that should not be planed away, top hinges whose screws have lost grip, deadbolt strikes fixed with short screws that stop in the jamb rather than reaching the framing, and hollow-core interior doors that have split or failed at the lock block.

Trim, baseboards and small carpentry

Around the old centre the profiles are not stocked, so a damaged section gets built up from available parts or milled to match. Modern stock trim beside an original profile is visible from across the room.

In the newer developments matching is straightforward, and the common jobs are casing damage, mitres that have opened as the house dried out, and gaps at the skirting after new flooring — that gap is the floor expansion gap and it gets covered with shoe moulding pinned to the baseboard, not filled.

Small carpentry: alcove and closet shelving, boxing in a pipe run, a window seat, a stair spindle or handrail bracket, a small access hatch, trim around a new opening. Not structural framing and not anything requiring a permit.

Distance

Wake Forest is about three quarters of an hour from us, the outer edge of our area. There is no travel surcharge, and a single door adjustment at that distance is not good value for you — we would rather say so and book one visit with the whole list on it.

Getting a price

Photograph the entrance from outside, the door closed from inside, and tell us which way the front of the house faces. For a storm door, that orientation is the first thing that shapes the recommendation.