Door Anatomy

You know those cheap doors that you get at Lowe's and Home Depot, the ones that cost around $60?  We replaced two of those in our house and, after letting them sit beside the house all winter, I finally cut them up and put them in the trash. The dissection was revealing, though.

First, the outer frame of the door, shown here on the far left.  It is made of actual wood.  In fact, the only thing that we would recognize as wood is used around the entire frame of the door.  As you can see, its not a very big piece of wood but it is wood.

The photo also highlights the material of the door proper: high-density fiberboard. This is the kind of stuff they use to make board games and books for infants.  As a point of reference, this is wood in the same way that Velveta is cheese.

To keep this wood-product from collapsing on itself another wood product of even lower quality is used as a spacer: corrugated cardboard. Every panel of the door a nice block of cardboard has been glued into place.

The obvious reason this door is so cheap is that there is hardly anything to it. Its an interior hollow-core door of quality commensurate with its price.  A true, solid wood door is easily an order of magnitude more expensive, possibly even two. Its great that we can easily buy good-enough doors for about a McDonald's daily wage. This is a good thing.  But let's not kid ourselves; these are not quality items that will last for decades.  This is a product that marginally accomplishes its goal at the lowest possible price.

And these doors are popular because they are so cheap; we replaced these doors with two more just like them. We only had so much money to use on getting the house in working order and we decided the money was better used on other things.  I hope we don't regret that choice.