Interior Doors near you

What is inside the leaf matters more than the face, and in a market where most doors are a moulded or flush skin over something, the only reliable test is to lift one. A hollow core door is light, cheap and fine for a linen cupboard, but it sounds like what it is, dents easily and gives very little to fix hardware to. A solid core door feels and sounds different, takes a decent lockset, and is the right answer for bedrooms, studies and bathrooms.

Moisture is the other variable. In the tropics and through a southern wet spring, timber doors and frames swell and then shrink again, which is why a door planed to fit while it is swollen ends up with a visible gap later. Ask for doors to be stored flat and acclimatised on site before they are hung, and for the top and bottom edges to be sealed, since an unsealed edge is how a door drinks moisture and starts to bow.

Sequence is what separates a good internal door job from a callback. A cavity slider frame has to be installed before the wall is lined, and nothing heavy can be fixed to that wall afterwards, so decide early where the television, the towel rail and the cabinets are going. Hinged doors are hung after the floor finish is known, because a door fitted before the tiles or the timber goes down will either drag or leave a gap you cannot close.

Wet areas have a detail that most homeowners never hear about until it fails. Waterproofing in a bathroom is carried out to AS 3740, with membranes to AS/NZS 4858, and where the bottom of a door jamb does not finish above the floor tiling, the portion of the door frame below the tiling has to be waterproofed. At a doorway in a fully waterproofed floor a waterstop is installed with a vertical leg finishing flush with the top of the finished floor level, and the membrane has to seal to it. If the frame and the jamb are going in before the waterproofer, say so to both trades.

Then there is the floor around the door. Where a doorway threshold is more than two hundred and thirty millimetres above the surface it adjoins it has to incorporate proper steps, and a landing is required where the sill of a threshold opens onto a stairway or ramp with a change greater than three risers or five hundred and seventy millimetres, at least seven hundred and fifty millimetres long, or six hundred for a non-habitable room, and no steeper than one in fifty. A door at the top of internal stairs is the place that rule shows up in an ordinary house.

Internal doors do quiet code work that no one thinks about until a wall moves. Habitable rooms need natural light, with windows of not less than ten per cent of the floor area of the room, or roof lights at three per cent. That light may come from an adjoining room through glazed panels or openings, provided their aggregate light transmitting area is not less than ten per cent of the floor area, and there is a neat catch for doors: if a doorway is used as the opening that provides the natural light, it has to do so in the closed position. A plain solid door does not qualify, which is why borrowed-light panels and glazed doors exist.

Ventilation works the same way with different numbers. A habitable room needs natural ventilation with a ventilating area of not less than five per cent of the floor area, through windows, doors or other openable devices, opening to a suitably sized court or space open to the sky, or to an open verandah or carport. Ventilation may also be borrowed from an adjoining room, where the connecting opening is not less than five per cent of the floor area of the room being ventilated and the adjoining room's own opening is not less than five per cent of the combined floor areas of both.

The practical consequence is that a study carved out of a living room, a bedroom created by closing off part of a larger space, or a wall built across a room with one window can each fail on light or ventilation even though the doors look fine. Raise it with the builder or a building surveyor before the framing goes up, not after the plasterer has left.

Sound takes the easiest path, and around most internal doors that path is the gap rather than the leaf. Swapping a hollow core door for a solid core one helps, but only if the door meets its stops and the gap under it is dealt with, and the two have to be done together to be worth doing at all.

The code only sets sound insulation numbers where dwellings meet. A separating wall between Class 1 buildings, or between a Class 1 building and a Class 10a building not associated with it, must achieve an airborne rating of not less than fifty when measured as Rw plus Ctr, and where a duct or pipe runs in that separating wall the access door to it must not open into any habitable room other than a kitchen and must be firmly fixed so that it overlaps the frame or the rebate by not less than ten millimetres. Inside a single house, quiet is a matter of choice rather than compliance.

Be careful with sealing, though. A bathroom or laundry that relies on air being drawn in under the door will not exhaust properly once you fit a full-length drop seal, so if you are sealing internal doors for sound, ask how make-up air reaches the rooms that need it.

Remember which way the year runs before you diagnose anything. Summer is December to February and winter June to August, and in the north the divide is the wet season and the dry. A door that binds in February in Cairns and swings freely in July is doing exactly what timber does, and planing it while it is swollen leaves a gap you will look at for the rest of the year.

Ground movement is the second seasonal cause and the one people miss. Houses on reactive clay soils lift and settle as the soil wets and dries, so frames go out of square over a cycle of years and a door that has always been fine suddenly catches at one corner. When several doors in the same part of the house start binding at once, the doors are not the problem.

The maintenance that actually helps is small and seasonal: check and tighten hinge and strike screws once a year, vacuum grit out of cavity slider and wardrobe tracks before the dry season dust turns them into a grinding paste, and re-coat any internal door that takes direct afternoon sun through a western window before the finish crazes.

Hanging a few doors usually falls below the value at which your state requires a licensed contractor, but the threshold is per contract and lower than most people expect, so a whole-house refit crosses it easily. Queensland requires a QBCC licence for building work above its threshold and tells homeowners to ask to see the contractor's card or digital licence; New South Wales requires a licence above the Home Building Act threshold for residential building work measured in labour and materials; Western Australia restricts particular building work to registered practitioners and contractors under the Building Services (Registration) Act 2011; and Victoria requires builders doing domestic building work above its threshold to be registered, with a practitioner search you can check yourself.

The moment internal door work turns into removing part of a wall, building in a cavity slider frame in a loadbearing wall, or altering a wet area, it is no longer joinery and the licensing and waterproofing questions both arrive. If a contractor offers to split one refit into several small invoices to stay under a threshold, treat that as information about the contractor.

LokalMatch is where the search starts. You describe the work once, saying how many doors, whether they are hinged or cavity sliders, whether the frames are staying, and whether any of them are in a bathroom or a wall that is being altered, and carpenters and door installers covering your postcode contact you directly. Those businesses pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not hang doors, does not set or quote prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend anyone, so the licence check stays with you.

Even a modest door job is a supply of goods and a supply of services, and the Australian Consumer Law guarantees both. The doors and hardware must be of acceptable quality, match their description and be fit for any purpose you made known, and the work must be carried out with acceptable care and skill and within a reasonable time when none was agreed. Those rights cannot be signed away by a term in a quote or by a business claiming its warranty has expired.

Where doors are concerned, the argument is almost always about whether a fault is the work or the house. Write the purpose down before the job: that the bathroom door must clear the new tiles, that the cavity slider must run without catching, that the study door must close against the stop along its full height. A fault measured against a written purpose is a straightforward conversation.

Keep the quote, the invoice naming the doors and hardware supplied, and a note of which rooms were done. For a minor problem the business must fix it free of charge, and where it refuses or takes too long you can have the fix done elsewhere and recover the reasonable cost, both of which are much easier to pursue with the paperwork in one place.