New doors.

One of the things that I love most about our house is that Slade has a play room. Technically, it’s a sun room but it serves the purpose of a play room quite well. And since it is a sun room, the room has four large floor to ceiling windows. There are also french doors that lead out onto our back deck.

After a friend of mine’s house was broken into twice within a two week period, once by kicking in the front door, I decided that I wanted to change out the doors in the playroom. The french doors were very unsecure and I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t take much effort at all to kick in those doors. On more than one occasion, strong winds actually rattled the door enough to set off the alarm, which scared me to death. And of course it always happened when my husband was not home, but at least it never happened in the middle of the night. So we started exploring door options. Let me just say that I am amazed by how many different options there are for doors. Luckily I had an idea of what I wanted, otherwise it would have been overwhelming.

We ultimately decided on patio doors with the blinds inside the door. So what’s the difference between french doors and patio doors? I did not know this before I started looking at doors, but apparently with french doors, both doors can be opened up, but with patio doors, only one door opens up. So the door that opens is much more secure because it latches into a stronger base.

We also took the opportunity to get doors with blinds inside the door. We had 2-inch wooden blinds on the old doors but Slade was constantly pulling on them trying to look outside. I went back and forth on the blinds decision though. I was worried that it would look strange to have a door with the blinds on the inside next to all of the windows with the 2-inch blinds. We decided to go ahead and get the doors with the blinds on the inside and I am so glad that we did. It looks great and I’m not constantly asking Slade to leave the blinds alone.

While better security was a high priority, we did choose doors that are mostly glass. We discussed this at great lengths and decided that since the doors are surrounded by 4 large windows, getting solid vs. glass doors wasn’t going to make a huge difference in the security of that room. Also, as part of the process to make our house more secure, we added an eight foot privacy fence around our backyard and keep the gate locked from the inside which makes it much more difficult to get access to our back deck. So I feel much better about the security of the house from the backside.

The new doors look great and I really couldn’t be any happier with the project.