Exterior Doors near you

The human impact provisions apply to areas people move through in everyday activities where someone could fall into or against a glazed panel, which is a fair description of every doorway in a house. Glass in a door must be Grade A safety glazing material, and an unframed glass door needs toughened safety glass of at least ten millimetres nominal thickness or laminated toughened safety glass.

The panels around the door matter as much as the door. Framed glass within three hundred millimetres of the nearest edge of the doorway opening requires Grade A safety glazing material, unless the lowest visible sight line is more than one point two metres above the highest abutting finished floor level. Glazing whose lowest sight line is less than five hundred millimetres above that floor level is treated as low-level glazing with its own requirements, and a large area of clear glass beside a door has to be made visible with an opaque band not less than twenty millimetres high, positioned with its upper edge not less than seven hundred millimetres and its lower edge not more than one point two metres above the floor.

You can verify all of this after the fact, which is unusual in building work. Safety glazing carries permanent etching or a label stating the standard, the manufacturer, the grade, the thickness and the type of glass, so walk up to a newly installed door and read the corner of the pane before you make the final payment.

The bit of a door job most likely to be got wrong is the floor under it. Where the sill of a threshold opens onto a stairway or ramp providing a change in level greater than three risers or five hundred and seventy millimetres, a landing is required, and it must extend across the full width of the doorway. Landings have a minimum length of seven hundred and fifty millimetres, reduced to six hundred millimetres for non-habitable rooms, and a gradient no steeper than one in fifty. Where a doorway threshold is more than two hundred and thirty millimetres above the surface it adjoins, it must incorporate steps built to the ordinary riser and going rules.

New houses now have to think about the opposite problem as well. The livable housing provisions for Class 1a buildings require a continuous, step-free path from the pedestrian entry, garage or parking space to a dwelling entrance door, and at least one level, step-free entrance door into the dwelling, with internal doors and corridors on that entry level that allow unimpeded movement. There are limited exemptions where site conditions such as a steep slope make it impracticable, but the rest of the livable housing requirements still apply.

For the door itself, the weatherproofing route is the same one used for windows: framed external glazed doors are designed and constructed as glazed assemblies to AS 2047, and the wall, including the openings around doors, has to prevent water penetration that would cause dampness or deterioration. Ask how the sill, jambs and head are flashed and drained, particularly where a sliding door sill meets a deck or a paved terrace with nowhere for water to go.

Draught sealing around doors is a code requirement, not just good practice. An external door serving a conditioned space, or a habitable room in the cooler climate zones, must be sealed, and the code is specific about how: the seal at the bottom edge of a door must be a draft protection device, while the other edges may be a foam or rubber compressible strip, a fibrous seal or the like. There are exemptions in some warm zones where the only air-conditioning is evaporative cooling, which relies on air moving through the house.

Those seals are also the cheapest comfort fix in most homes, and the first thing to check when a room will not hold its temperature. They wear out quietly: a bottom seal dragged over a tiled threshold for a decade is usually flattened long before anyone notices the draught.

Proximity to a boundary changes the door. An external wall of a house less than nine hundred millimetres from an allotment boundary other than a road boundary, or less than one point eight metres from another building on the same allotment, must meet fire-resisting construction requirements, with a fire resistance level of not less than sixty sixty sixty tested from the outside as one accepted form. Openings in such a wall must then be protected, and for a doorway that means a self-closing solid core door not less than thirty five millimetres thick, with non-openable fire windows or equivalent construction used for glazed openings. South Australia adds a requirement for walls close to a brush fence.

On designated bushfire prone land, the house and its associated decks must be designed and constructed to reduce the risk of ignition from a bushfire, with the deemed-to-satisfy path being construction to AS 3959 at the bushfire attack level assessed for the site, running from BAL-Low up to BAL-FZ. As the level rises the constraints on doors, glazing, screening and the gaps around frames tighten, so get the assessment done before choosing a door.

Licensing follows the usual state lines, by value and by type of work, with New South Wales also licensing glazing as a trade in its own right and Western Australia restricting particular building work to registered practitioners and contractors. LokalMatch is where the search for those businesses starts: you describe the door once, saying whether it is an entry door, a slider or a bi-fold, what the opening measures, whether it is being replaced like for like or changed, and whether the site is bushfire prone, and matched installers contact you directly. They pay for those requests. LokalMatch does not fit doors, does not set or quote prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend any business, so checking the licence and the product certification is still your job.

Where a door job forms part of a residential building contract above your state's threshold, the usual protections apply. New South Wales requires a written contract above its threshold, caps the deposit at ten per cent for both small and large jobs, gives a cooling-off period of five clear business days on large jobs and requires the Consumer Building Guide and a Home Building Compensation certificate. Queensland requires cover under the Home Warranty Scheme for residential building work above its threshold, with the contractor paying the premium based on the insurable value.

A door is both a product and an installation, and the consumer guarantees follow that split. As goods, the door and its hardware must be of acceptable quality and match their description, and manufacturers must provide spare parts and repair facilities for a reasonable time after purchase, which is worth knowing when a proprietary lock fails. As a service, the installation must be carried out with due care and skill, be fit for the purpose you made known and be supplied within a reasonable time.

Keep the order confirmation naming the door, the glazing type and any bushfire attack level assessment, the hardware details, the manufacturer's warranty and the installer's workmanship warranty together. When a bi-fold stops folding properly in its fourth summer, that file is what determines who fixes it.