Knock knock

This week Joe had a little accident (oops, I think I phrased that badly).
He locked himself out of the house and unfortunetely our front door has one of the those latches that, once it’s closed, it’s closed (I think it’s called a Rim lock?)

He could either freeze outside in the dark, whilst the water was left running inside (silly man), and wait for me to get home from work three hours later. OR, he could smash one of the glass panels in the door and let himself in.

Reacting to his caveman urges, Joe decided he wanted to batter something, and as you can tell from the below picture,Joe had to break in to our own home (I repeat, silly man).

Please note: this is a completely unfinished room that needs flooring and new walls. Please don’t judge! 🙂

For about one day, it looked like we had an abandoned boarded up house because of that one missing pane, but luckily Joe managed to replace it pretty sharpish.

And although the whole debacle was a bit of a pain in the ass and caused me to worry unnecesarily like the panic monster that I am, (“Quick, Joe, is our contents insurance up to date? What if someone comes with an axe? Do we need to protect the door?”) it was a great opportunity to start shopping around online for external doors. This isn’t a door we want to keep permanently anyway and it was always in mind that one day, we’d update it. In fact, there is only one other house on our road, out of 32, that has this original door from when they were built in the 1940s. But, times change…plus i think it’s ugly.

Whilst doing research online, I can’t seem to make up my mind whether we should go for a wooden door, a PVC door or a Composite door (decisive as ever!). And to be quite frank, I’ve found the internet pretty useless on this occasion as you are always being sold something.

This is what I have gathered about each so far (but please feel free to correct me if I’m mis-informed!):

Wooden doors

A natural insulator
Cheap if you go to the right place
Looks more traditional
Needs maintaining/painting every few years
We are in direct sunlight and this could affect the wood

uPVC doors

Modern looking
Will match the windows
Great insulator
Reasonably priced
Not much flexibility in door colour

Composite doors

Really secure and could possibly lower insurance
Comes in a range of funky colours
Only comes in certain sizes and may not fit our doorframe
Very expensive

Plenty to think about I think you’ll agree! It seems that a Composite door would be the ideal chioce, but when i did a quote for a pretty standard door, the price was just not anywhere near what we’re willing to pay…

Just in case you didn’t spot that….
Yup. think we’ll have to pass on the Composite for now.
As you can see from our door below, there is a window next to it, at the bottom of the stairs. A lot of the neighbours have matched the pattern in their window to the one in their PVC doors. It’s something I’d love to do but I’m not sure how to go about it.

(Hello Pebbles! Back again? :))
I think we need to do more research really. After all, the front door to your house is really the first thing you see isn’t it? I want it to be a good’un.