August 1st, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Repairs & Renovations
Top Left: TruStile Arts & Craft Collection | Top Right: Longhi Shadow System | Bottom: Bartels Interior Sliding System
So, after my recent rant about poor interior door choices, I thought it would be appropriate to provide some resources for better interior doors.
Here are some links to websites that offer extremely stylish doors:
- Neoporte – Very modern doors
- JeldWen – Offers a wide variety of doors, in many different styles
- AlumiDoors – Some very cool sliding doors
- TruStile – A wide variety, including numerous historically styled collections
- ICON – Very modern
- Longhi – Pretty modern, very cool
- Bartels – Self-proclaimed “exceptional doors”
- Modernus – As you could probably guess by the name, these doors are pretty modern too.
Tags: architectural details, door, interior doors
August 1st, 2009 | No Comments | Posted in Repairs & Renovations
If you’ve been following this blog so far, or if you’re friends with us, you probably already know our housing situation. If you haven’t been keeping up, then let me catch you up to speed.
Laura and I bought this old house that we’re living in about 8 months ago, in December. It’s pretty old, although there seems to be some conflicting answers about just how old it really is. The previous owner said it was built in 1918, and the tax assessor says it was built in 1923. Either way, it’s by far the oldest (and coolest) house that we’ve ever owned.
During the last 8 months, we’ve been working like slaves to make improvements to the house. We’ve painted about 50% of the interior, replaced numerous light and electrical fixtures, installed a sump pump and dehumidifier in the basement, completely re-landscaped the yard, and dealt with tons of other issues as they arose. Despite all of the time and energy that we’ve invested, we’re nowhere near finished. There’s still infinite projects that we can’t wait to tackle.
Just one of our many ugly doors. Very 1980-ish. It's too bad they replaced beautiful two-panel wood doors with these!
One such project, is replacing the interior doors. To be real honest, the interior doors in this house are downright atrocious. The house was remodeled sometime in the 1980’s, and whoever did the work replaced all of the old, beautiful 2-panel historic doors (except 2 of them,) with the cheapest 6-panel doors they could find.
If they hadn’t left behind the two original doors, it might not be as upsetting, but the original doors are VERY cool. If I could get my hands on the guy that stripped out all of the other old doors and replaced them with the cheap, ugly ones, I’d probably smash his testicles with a wooden mallet. (But this isn’t a blog about anger management issues!)
The point that I’m trying to get to here, is that people make really bad choices when it comes to interior doors.
If you walk through most any new construction, you’ll notice the same thing; the builders are using the cheapest doors they can get their hands on, with no regard to style. Whatever happened to beautiful interior doors?
If you walk through some historic homes from the 1800’s and early 1900’s, assuming some jackass hasn’t replaced them all, you’ll see some of the most beautiful interior doors that you’ve ever laid eyes on. You’ll also see find endless other interior / architectural details that made those old homes truly special.
At what point did Americans lose sight of what made a home better than average? At what point did we decide that we’d ditch the beautiful architectural details of old, in lieu of saving a few bucks? More importantly, why did we lose sight of the importance of architectural details? I mean seriously, we spend more time in our homes than most any other place that we go. Did we become “cheap” and decide that it wasn’t worth the money? Did we become lazy, and decide that it wasn’t worth the time to demand better materials and craftsmanship? Or is there another issue that I’m missing all together?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me and my home, we just won’t settle for mediocrity. There’s many other issues that are more pressing at the moment, but stay tuned … we will replace these ugly doors – eventually!
Tags: architectural details, door, interior doors
