The Ultimate Guide To Keeping Your Front Door Safe From The Elements

A high-quality door really elevates a home’s appearance, which is why so many homeowners spring for a solid core wood exterior entryway door in a design that complements their home’s facade. But even the toughest and densest wood doors don’t stand a chance against nature’s slow, patient assault.

Day by day, direct sunlight will fade and discolor your door, tarnishing the natural beauty of its wood grain. Rain and other precipitation will cause your door to warp, making it difficult to open or close the door properly and creating a security risk. Like all problems, there’s a solution, and in this case, it’s a good idea to be proactive so you don’t end up having to replace your door slab entirely. With proper care and precautionary measures, your door can last for years and years. You went out of your way to get the best door possible, so make sure you do what you can to preserve it.

Awning

Perhaps the most straightforward way to prevent natural damage to your front door from sun exposure and precipitation is installing an awning. An awning, or overhang, will shade your door from the sun, keep the rain from infiltrating your door, and prevent damage from more extreme situations, like hurricane-thrown debris and hail.

Awnings are a relatively inexpensive home alteration, but if you want to go a step further – and if you’ve been hungering for a major home improvement project – constructing a covered front patio will accomplish everything an awning will, with the added benefit of having a little slice of outdoor shelter where you can entertain guests and enjoy the shade on a summer day.

Storm Door

Another viable hardware countermeasure against elemental wear and tear is the storm door. Like awnings and overhangs, storm doors provide a physical guard against nature. A storm door is installed outside the main exterior entry door slab; whereas a front door normally opens inward, a storm door almost always opens outward. Storm doors typically feature a pneumatic closing mechanism that prevents the door from slamming.

Storm doors are great for keeping out aggressive rain, acting like the door slab’s personal shield. However, storm doors aren’t ideal for blocking sunlight, because the majority of storm door designs feature at least one large window panel. These panels, meant to provide visibility, are outfitted with glass or screens, and easily let in direct sunlight. While completely opaque storm doors exist, there’s another reason most storm doors are see-through: nobody wants to go through all that trouble to protect their front door only to hide it away. Another drawback: storm doors can lock in the summer heat, affecting your door’s varnish.

UV-Blocking Varnish

A wood door’s varnish is like a thin barrier between the wood and the outdoors. Most functional and ornamental wood products have some kind of varnish or other topcoat applied to them, and while all wood doors are usually given a coat of varnish, and most varnish accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish, not all varnish is made equal. 

UV-blocking varnishes are designed specifically to filter out ultra-violet radiation from the sun, keeping it from penetrating through to your door. That UV radiation is what causes fading and discoloration in regular varnished wood slabs. UV blocking varnish is used commonly in the sunbelt, where homes get more constant direct sunlight. Maybe the rest of us can learn a thing or two.

Boat Varnish

Speaking of the sunbelt, there’s a loyal faction of door caretakers who swear by boat varnish for its weatherproofing potential, and they just might be on to something. It might sound like an excerpt from the book of Florida Man, but there are plenty of reasons why someone would want to apply boat varnish to their front door, and so far, it seems to be working.

Because boat varnish is formulated to coat and protect the hulls of seafaring watercraft, which are subject to constant exposure to corrosive saltwater and all kinds of debris, they’re more than cut out for guarding your front door. Boat varnish, especially in multiple coats, will be more durable than typical polyurethane varnish.

Light Paint

Protective varnishes may be much more effective than standard varnishes, but at the end of the day, all varnishes let in some damaging sunlight. This is something we have to live with since a translucent varnish allows us and our neighbors to appreciate the luxurious grain patterns present in our high-quality wood doors. However, there is a more totalitarian solution: paint.

Yes, if you really can’t stand the thought of your wood door becoming faded and washed out in the sands of time, maybe just paint over it. A light-colored paint will reflect more sunlight than it absorbs, which will contribute to a cooler interior, and when you one day decide to sand off that paint, you’ll discover a perfectly preserved wood grain, good as new. Time to live it up again with a clear varnish!

Synthetic Door

Wood purists close your browsers now because you will not like this: it may be time to step away from the wood.

While wood is a wonderful material for fine and precise crafting, and it stands totally unmatched in the world of luxury construction materials, it is ultimately a degradable material. No matter what you do, your wood door won’t last forever, and if you’re tired of replacing doors, or petrified by the thought of your first quality wood door being abused day after day by ruthless sunshine and drowning raindrops, perhaps a synthetic door slab is for you.

Fiberglass and metal are both highly regarded as door slab materials because of their resilience, and while the fiberglass and metal door slabs of the past may have been eyesores, these days it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart from artfully rendered wood. On top of that, fiberglass and metal do a fantastic job at insulating the interior of your home from the outdoors, keeping things cool in the summer and warm in the winter.