Side door of your garage

Take a good look at the exterior door on your garage. If it's like most others here in south Florida the bottom of the door jambs are going to have decay. In some cases that decay will still be in the early stages and only show as a discoloration on the bottom six inches of the jambs. On most you will have active rot and will be able to stick your finger right into the wood of the jamb. In all likelihood the rot will also have extended to the bottom corner of the door on the hinge side. If your house was built in the past 20 years the door will probably be steel and you'll have rot and rust! While you're there notice that your hinges are rusted and look nasty and the lock and deadbolt hardly work at all. Most people use these doors so infrequently that they don't notice the damage at all until the day the door won't close or the lock won't lock. This happens because the doors were installed without being painted first. A coat of primer and some topcoat on the bottom and top of these doors would go a long way toward making them last. Unfortunately the carpenters didn't paint and the painters rarely removed exterior doors to paint the bottoms.

You may be wondering why you should be concerned with a door you rarely use or see. What you can't see is that in all likelihood your door is held in the rough opening with 6 or 8 nails. They may be just as rusty as the hinges and have lost most of their holding power. In a hurricane strong winds and suction could rip your door off it's hinges or even rip the whole assembly out of the rough opening. Losing a door or window allows hurricane force winds into your house which pushes up on your roof and there goes your house.

Trying to repair what's there is a waste of time and money. We can repair the wood jambs with epoxies, replace the hinges and install new locksets but those repairs rarely last long, never look good and aren't cost effective.

Technology may seem like a strange word to use in relation to carpentry but it's not. There are all sorts of high tech products out there now that are used for making doors, jambs, hinges etc., that won't rot or rust. We use storm rated fiberglass doors with PVC interiors, PVC jambs and stainless steel hinges. Unlike wood fiberglass won't rot, unlike steel it won't rust. Since moisture can't get behind it a good paint job can last 10 years or more. PVC jambs are made of the same material that your plumbing pipes are so obviously water won't hurt them and stainless hinges and screws won't rust and corrode. If you go ahead and install a quality stainless lockset you'll have a door that won't need any anymore than cosmetic maintenance for years to come. Before we install a new door we fasten the wood bucks to the concrete block with about 24 concrete screws. Once we have the bucks secure we install the jambs to the bucks with about 24 stainless steel screws. Once we have the door installed in the jambs and everything is working properly we spray polyurethane foam in the gap between the buck and jamb. The foam is not only an air barrier but also a super strong adhesive that glues the block, bucks and jambs together. Now you have a door assembly that isn't going to fail during a hurricane.