Storm Door

For those of you who have installed storm doors, I just wanted to see what the price ranges for the full view glass storm door. I got the estimate from home depot and they are charging me close to $160 for installation on top of $180 on the door.. does this sound reasonable?[?]

 

Just install it yourself and save the cash, it's fairly easy.

 

That depends on your door frame. Mine had to be built out to clear the door knob which was not something I was willing (or capable) of doing. Home Depot installation back in March 2001 was $229 -- $129 for basic install and $90 for frame build out.

 

DO NOT HAVE HOMEDEPOT OR LOWES INSTALL YOUR STORM DOOR!!!!

A friend of mine did this and ran into all kinds of problems. The installer didn't show up on the day were suppose to. Work was not done to homeowner satisfaction. I've heard homedepot and lowes outsource the work. I'm thinking these subcontractors must be rejects if they need work from a national chain.

My advice is to do it yourself if you can, ask a neighbor who has done it before, or call a referred contractor. I can't say for sure you'll run into problems but from what I heard about national chains doing work, there seems to be more problems than satisified customers.

-Teak

 

We purchased our garage door openers from Lowes and had Lowes install them. Lowes DID subcontract out the installation -- we found the subcontractor to be quite knowledgeable and friendly, and we were very happy with the quality of the work. I think you run the risk of poor quality whether you go through a national chain or not -- I do not think it is helpful or accurate to make blanket statements about "reject" subcontractors.

That said, it is always a good idea to get recommendations from your neighbors. We would be glad to provide the name of the subcontractor who installed our garage door openers -- maybe you could save some money by not going through Lowes. (And maybe our garage door installer also does storm door installations...)

 

I am very happy with the Home Depot install on my storm door. The subcontractor did an excellent job and painted the bump-out to match the rest of the door frame.

If you have a problem with a Home Depot subcontractor installation, I would think you stand a better chance of getting it corrected through Home Depot then you would with Joe Handyman -- this is only MY opinion and two cents worth.

 

I also had HD do it. The guy who did it was excellent. Showed up on time, knew what he was doing and was very friendly. He was a college kid down from Maine making money to go back.

 

Thanks for the input everyone,
I did end up going with home depot and picked out the door and whole nine yards yesterday. We haven't set up a date for them to come to install the door yet, but I'll definately let everyone know how things went. The price came up little higher than expected, but we'll see. According to them, I needed extra board to bump out the door frame to install the storm door,,, so everything came out to around $350.00. Hope I didn't pay too much,,,

 

Glad to hear people had good experiences with a national chain. I'll stick with referred contractors. Heard too many horror stories which one ended up in a lawsuit against Homedepot.

Kassiabi, ask if that includes any painting. Not sure if your project will involve it.

-Teak

 

Hello All,

Just an update on how everything went with HD installing my storm door. I'm more than happy with their work ! They were on time with the appointment, did an excellent job installing the door,, The contractor even stuck around afterwards to explain how to use the door step-by step and didn't mind at all about answering my little (some stupid questions. I'm really happy with the result and you should definately use them if you need any door work done. By the way, I went thru the HD in Ashburn.

 

Did you get approval from the HOA before installing the storm door?

When we moved in and received our HOA books, they had mentioned (in the books) that our storm door was installed by the previous owners without HOA aproval.

We never heard anything after that though. The door looks like it came with the house.

 

You won't, the former owners probably heard about it when Arlene came over to do the sales inspection. That's right, the HOA does do an inspection to see if anything was done to the house without the Modifications Subcommittee approval. I suspect that the door was approved once the request was reviewed, however, there are sales that have been stalled as the changes were definitely outside the Guidelines.
[8)]

Neil Z.
Resident since 1999