Patio Door Project

When we bought our NoVA house, the windows had been replaced by the previous owners and were only a couple years old, but the 2 sets of patio doors in the kitchen and family room.... you guessed it... were 35 years old and original to the house.

Here is a picture from our house hunting trip (the house was staged for showing).  Not a great picture, but you get the idea.

They were brown metal doors and technically double-pane but sure didn't feel like it.  In the winter (and even with the mildly cool temperatures so far this far) the doors are freezing cold around the frame and let in a terrible draft.  When you walked into our kitchen/family room area in the morning, these rooms were easily 5 degrees cooler than the rest of the house.

After last winter and realizing the inefficiency of these doors, we decided we needed to have them replaced.  I did some research and decided on Pella doors.  They are not top-of-the-line but a drastic improvement from what we had.  Given the remaining duration that we will live in this house, they were fine for our purposes.  (As a side note, we ordered the doors through Lowes.  We got quotes from the Pella Store but they were ironically more expensive.)

I got 2 quotes for installation and to my surprise, the installation cost more than the doors!  Yikes!  Thankfully, my Dad felt confident about our DIY capability so he flew out one weekend to help us install them.

Installation was quick and uncomplicated.  Although, I was a little nervous at this point:

I was not surprised to see that when we took the exterior and interior trim off, there was not a drop of caulk or any kind of insulation in the small gap between the doorway frame and patio door.  Basically, the only "insulation" was the trim itself.  No wonder there was a terrible draft!

We managed to remove the old doors and install the new ones (both sets) in about 6 hours.  We didn't have time over the weekend to replace the trim with my Dad.  Bryce and I tackled that on our own.  It ended up being the most complicated part since the doors were a slightly different size and fit inside the doorway differently.  We made several trips to Home Depot and had to borrow a friend's table saw to install new trim work.  It was complicated, tedious and time consuming but luckily not difficult.

Ahhh... the finished product.  So. Much. Better.  The first 20-something degree morning after we installed the doors, I walked into the kitchen/family room in the morning and it was actually warm!  There is no longer a draft and to my surprise, I didn't realize how much outside noise the old doors let in until we had the new ones.  It is eerily quiet now in those rooms.

I'm not sure we will get our money back on home efficiency improvement in the 2 winters we have remaining in NoVA, but it was worth it for comfort.