When it comes to transforming the ambiance of your living spaces, nothing exudes elegance and warmth quite like premium wooden flat panel doors. These doors are not just functional barriers; they are a statement of timeless beauty and craftsmanship. In this article, we'll explore the myriad benefits of choosing premium wooden flat panel doors for your home, how they can enhance your interior design, and why they are an excellent investment for both aesthetics and functionality.
Superior Craftsmanship: Premium wooden flat panel doors are a testament to the artistry and skill of master craftsmen. Each door is meticulously handcrafted to ensure a flawless finish and exceptional durability. The intricate details and attention to grain patterns and textures make these doors a true work of art that can instantly elevate the look of any room.
Timeless Elegance: Wood has an enduring appeal that never goes out of style. Whether your home features a classic, modern, or rustic interior design, premium wooden flat panel doors seamlessly blend in, adding a touch of timeless elegance. The warmth of wood creates a welcoming atmosphere that is both comforting and aesthetically pleasing.
Durability and Longevity: Investing in premium wooden flat panel doors means investing in doors that are built to last. High-quality wood, along with expert craftsmanship and finishes, ensures that these doors will endure for generations. Unlike some other materials, wood ages gracefully, developing a beautiful patina over time.
Customization Options: One of the significant advantages of premium wooden flat panel doors is the ability to customize them to suit your unique style and preferences. From choosing the type of wood and stain to selecting hardware and panel designs, you have the freedom to create doors that perfectly complement your home's interior.
Energy Efficiency: Wooden doors provide excellent insulation, helping to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature and reduce energy bills. Their natural insulating properties make them a practical choice for all seasons, keeping your home warm in winter and cool in summer.
Increased Property Value: Installing premium wooden flat panel doors can significantly enhance the resale value of your home. Potential buyers often appreciate the aesthetic appeal and durability of wooden doors, making your property more attractive in the real estate market.
Easy Maintenance: Contrary to common belief, wooden doors are relatively easy to maintain. With regular cleaning and periodic refinishing, these doors can retain their beauty for many years. Plus, any minor scratches or blemishes can be easily repaired, extending their lifespan.
Custom Doors for Bathrooms and Toilet Rooms
Estate Millwork doors are ideal for bathroom and toilet room partitions, privacy panels or water closet doors. Because they are hand made, they carry an air of distinction and tradition and can be used in both commercial and residential applications. Our bathroom doors can be configured with louvers, panels or a combination, and in virtually any species of hardwood.
Custom thicknesses and partition hinging
Our doors can be ordered at a full interior thickness of 1 3/8, or anywhere in the range from 3/4" to 2 1/4". If a classical locker room or club room look is desired, we recommend stained mahogany or cherry, while if the application requires paint grade, our Poplar toilet room doors are an ideal and economical choice. The flat panel designs of our partition doors is only a starting point, we also make louvered doors and can do custom detailing with quirking, appliques or patterned cut outs.
Built to Last
Like all of Estate Millworks custom doors, our flat panel bathroom doors are built with true mortise and tenon joinery and precision CNC machined hardwoods. You can use our website to browse through our door designs, and quickly price the perfect toilet room door for your application.
Wooden Doors Fabricated from Premium Lumber Grades
Stain Grade Lumber
For our louvered door products ordered in stain grade, we use FAS clear hardwood grades for both domestic and imported lumber. For projects requiring environmentally sensitive grades, we also offer FSC certification when required. We procure all of our lumber electronically, and order only the FAS clear grades. Additionally, we pre-select and inspect each shipment of lumber, and moisture check to insure that it meets our 8% standard. And as part of our routine quality process, each board from a unit of lumber is inspected as part of our quality louvered door manufacturing process.
Paint Grade Lumber
Even our economical paint grade louvered doors are manufactured from FAS grade lumber. The FAS specification controls the type of defects that are permitted, including knots, which we exclude from our paint grade products. However, features that would be considered defects in stain grade products -- color streaks, mineral discoloration etc, are not pertinent in paint grade. Typically, we use Poplar and occasionally Oak and Soft Maple for our paint grade products.
Color and Grain Matching
For high end louvered doors, we can offer a pre-selection service whereby all of the lumber required for the entire louvered door job is picked, inspected, and designated to be assembled as a unit at one time, which often results in boards from the same tree ending up in the same door for maximum consistency. When specified we can also book match raised panels and flat panels when used in our louvered doors.
Milling and Sawing Specifications
For our highly discriminating louvered door customers, we can offer our various hardwood species to be sawn in certain way, to emphasize a desirable feature of the wood. If required, the door material can be specified as flat-sawn, quarter-sawn, rift-sawn or ribbon sawn. Talk with your Estate Millwork louvered door specialist to inquire about adding these specifications to your order.
Top Quality and Elegant Custom Wood Doors
Estate Millwork creates each custom wood door from your detailed specifications. We use premium materials, state of the art equipment, and an experienced, quality oriented staff to produce our doors. We follow each of the steps below to produce the finest wooden doors on the market.
Hand Selection and Inspection of Materials
Our lumber procurement process is computer driven so that we are sure to be getting the best possible price on the highest quality materials. Once your order is "green-lighted" for production in our plant, the lumber demand is compared to our shop inventory and automatic replenishment orders are placed if necessary. When production begins on each custom door, the material is hand selected and the best of our high quality stock is used for the solid stiles of the doors. Louvers and rails are generally selected from the same lot of material to afford the best match, within the natural variation of hardwoods.
Precision Ripping of Rails and Stiles
We minimize the costs of our high quality products by maximizing the yield on the rough lumber. Once the lumber of the appropriate thickness has been selected, it is passed through our ripping department where a specialized gang rip saw is used to get the maximum yield from each board. Our operators are trained to reject defective materials either during the selection process or during the sawing process, as some defects are latent and are not visible until the board is "opened up".
Hand Jointing of All Door Components
The next step is to hand joint each rough sawn board to get a true flat edge, and to relieve any internal stress in the solid wood. This is a step that is skipped by many modern door manufactures, but one that we believe is so important that we honor the tradition. Our most skilled craftsmen in the plant are responsible for this function which requires judgement, precision and experience. Lower quality door manufacturers skip this step, or use particle cores and veneers to fake the look of a real door. But by hand jointing each board, we insure that every other step in the process is operating on a flat, smooth board, and that the door will remain stable for its lifetime.
Precision moulding of all door components
Once the rails and stiles have been ripped to width and jointed on one face, we process them through a 5 headed moulder which reduces the wooden door components (rails, stiles, louvers) to their final cross sectional dimensions and profiles. We offer 3 stock louver sizes, but can customize them to any other size or profile. Again, at this phase, parts are inspected for defects to make sure that the final piece meets our high standards
Precision CNC Machining of Mortises, Tenons and Louver Slots
Because we do not cut corners, we also use old fashioned, but time tested joinery. Our doors are held together with true mortise and tenon joints, rather than the cheaper, less time consuming and lower quality options of dowels, screws, or biscuits. Our mortise and tenon joints are so precise and tight fitting that gluing the doors is not even necessary, they hold themselves together. Our CNC eqiupment is accurate to .001 inch, and is automatically programmed by our advanced plant management system that monitors your order as it proceeds through each department. Our CNC operators are highly skilled and go through a year of specialized on the job training where they learn the safe operation of the equipment, and advanced techniques like radius and pattern machining.
Hand Assembly by Experienced Craftsmen
Once all of the custom door parts are completely machined, they are pre-sanded and then hand assembled by a team of meticulous craftsmen. On fixed louver doors, the louvers are hand beveled and inserted into the deep seat louver mortises in the stiles, and then the entire door is clamped in a clamping system while the pegs are drilled into the tenons. Operable Louver doors are assembled in a similar fashion, where each louver is set in a nylon bushing for maximum life, and a custom louver rod is attached to the louvers to give trouble free, friction free operation for many years.
Machine Sanding to tolerance
Once the door has been completely assembled, it goes through our machine sanding department -- giant sanders big enough to sand garage doors are used for multiple passes to bring the surfaces to their final dimensions and grit. In most cases our doors are machine sanded to 150 which removes most visible roughness.
Hand Sanding.
The final step in our process is the hand sanding of the doors to break edges, and to finish sand areas that are not sanded by the machine process. Our finishers are the best in the business and during this phase, they carefully inspect the finished product and either prepare it for paint or stain, or carefully pack the door for shipment.
Maple a True Hardwood
Maple is one of the widest spread species in North America and can be found in nearly every region of the continent. Maple is very hard for a domestic wood and is widely used in cabinetry and flooring, and its light blond color makes it a great species for matching any decor. It is a fine-pored wood with a very tight grain the sapwood is almost white, and Maple is one of the only trees for which the sapwood is almost as highly prized as the heartwood.
The wood's high density and hardness mean that Maple can be harsh on cutting edges, but Maple will maintain a hard, crisp edge for mouldings. The wood is quite stable, thereby making it perfect for flooring applications. Because of the tight grain, however, stains, dyes, and wax will not penetrate very deeply; therefore, surface film finishing options like varnish and lacquer are the preferred finishing methods.
Handcrafted with Sustainably Harvested Lumber
At Estate Millwork we air dry much of our lumber, and after air drying we finish drying in low wattage dehumidification kilns.
Every piece of wood we purchase is used to the fullest on products, at Estate Millwork we have a very high yield ratio of 94 percent due to the use of automated saws and optimizing software. The remainimg 6 percent which is mostly sawdust and chips are either burned to heat our plant or send to local cattle farmers for bedding and composting.
Nothing is wasted. Some of Appalachian lumber we use comes from Amish farmers in our county who harvest with horses instead of mechanized equipment, and do our rough sawing on 1920s sawmills that are also extremely low input compared to larger commercial sawmills of today. All of our imported lumber is plantation grown, and not harvested from natural forests.
To learn more about our sustainability practices click here
