When it comes time to replace your front door why look further than a solid wooden door from Estate Millwork. There are plenty of benefits in choosing a solid wooden door over inferior materials such as fiberglass or uPVC, such as style, insulation properties and overall maintenance. Wooden front doors make a statement to those coming to your home, they can be painted or stained any color you choose, are available in a variety of different wood species and styles. Whether you are looking to add other design elements such as glass panels or metal work wooden doors can be customized to fit your needs. Wooden doors are a true statement piece, whether it is the solid feel, the added warmth and security, or the overall texture of the door.
Wooden doors have a very high R-value giving them superior insulation to chanages in temperature while also reducing noise from another room. Other benefits of wooden doors are they are resistant to rust, very durable meaning they will last a long time when well maintained.
Why Choose a Wooden Door?
Doors both interior and exterior come in many different materials metal, fiberglass, uPVC, engineered wood, and solid wood. Solid wooden doors are suitable for both interior and exterior use, and are strong, durable and secure all while offering a high end feel. Need help choosing the wooden door right for you contact us at sales@estatemillwork.com or use our state of the are door designer.
Louvered Pocket Doors are an Elegant Way to Divide Living Spaces
Louvered Doors can be ordered in a sliding or bypass configuration for closets or rooms whereby the louvered door is received by an opening in the wall, either on one or both sides of the opening. Commonly used for larger doors that partition walk in closets, rooms, or living spaces, pocket doors are a very convenient way to quickly separate or unify spaces. When open, the doors are not visible. Probably the most complicated method for installation, it often requires pre-planning, for the removal of studs and the addition of headers, and it is most economically done in new construction. However, it is a very common application in well-built older homes as well, and Estate Millwork can exactly match your existing pocket doors if they need to be replaced, or to be used in a remodeling.
Precision Crafted Louvered Doors Using State of the Art CNC Machinery
Solid Louvers
Each louver in our louvered doors is precision machined in a 5 head moulder that can be configured to mould any of our 3 standard production profiles, or custom profiles as specified by the customer. We offer 1/2" X 2 1/4", 3/8" X 1 3/4", and 1/4" X 1 1/4" bullnose profiles, but also have tooling for chevron, beveled, and other louver profiles. Whether the louvered door is to use fixed louver or operable louvers, we can even create custom tooling to match existing millwork, or to provide the ultimate in personalization and detailing.
True Louvered Door Mortises and Louver Mortises
Each louver in a fixed louvered door is seated in a 7/16" deep mortise in the door stile. Our CNC machining equipment be instantly programmed to program any variation of louver size, profile, pitch, and spacing, that gives us unlimited flexibility to match historic millwork, or to create custom louvered doors to a precise specification in terms of louver count, rail placement, and air flow. In the same pass as the louver mortises are being created, our equipment also creates the larger mortises for each rail in the door. Unlike many custom door manufacturers today, Estate Millwork does not use cheap dowels, veneers, screws, or biscuits. Instead we use old fashioned mortise and tenon joints, even though they are considered by other custom door manufacturers as too expensive. Because we have invested heavily in automation, our cost to produce highly custom louvered doors using solid materials and premium joinery is much lower than other manufacturers, hence: higher quality, lower price.
Solid Tenons
The tenons on both ends of each rail are engineered to give maximum stability to the louvered door frame, and when combined with our hardwood dowling, the door frame will stay together and be extremely stable, even without glue. But of course we use glue for added strength. For larger louvered doors, we use a 10 inch baserail that has two tenons and a third feather tenon for additional strength that connects the two main tenons. These tenons are precision machined on a propriety tenon machine that Estate Millwork designed and custom built. Our sophisticated mortise and tenon joinery preserves 100% of the quality of traditional mortise and tenon joinery at a fraction of the cost.
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.
Poplar the Poor Man's Cherry
Poplar hardwood lacking bold coloration or an exciting grain pattern has a pale olive-yellow brown heartwood and sapwood is lighter off-white or gray with greenish hues and doesn't often get the respect we feel it deserves. The Poplar tree is widespread across all of North America and Europe, and it grows very rapidly and to large sizes, making it very easy to sustain.
Because the wood is often painted or used in secondary applications where it isn’t visible, it is very easy to find wide, clear sections of Poplar for a variety of uses.
Poplar lumber is pretty soft and very easy to work. But botanically speaking it is a hardwood meaning it is a deciduous tree. But it is highly stable, easily available in width and length, and takes paint and stain famously well. However using Poplar as a stain grade species is often overlooked. Some will call Poplar wood "poor man's Cherry" as it oxidizes over time to a much darker shade of brown.
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
