Tom has been busy this last day or so both manhandling and finessing our extra deep exterior doors into place. While we went with the Serious 525 fiberglass series for the windows, we just couldn’t justify the extra cost for the Serious doors. Plus, all Serious is doing is buying prehung doors by Thermatru and slipping their own glass into them, so it’s still a conventional frame.
Instead, we opted to buy Thermatru Smooth-Star fiberglass doors with just double pane low-e glass in them. To meet the Passive House Standards with the higher U-value door glass, our modeling called for increasing our exterior wall insulation from ten to eleven inches. Just that extra inch of insulation is still a few thousand dollars cheaper than the cost of the triple-pane Serious glass in a standard Thermatru door.
A few wrinkles: We were able to get Thermatru to make a 12″ thick jamb, such that our doors hinge on the interior side of our double stud and are able to swing freely. However, the deepest sill we could get was only 8″ deep. So, if you look at the photos, you can see the jambs of the doors stick past the actual sill by a couple inches.
To solve this flashing issue, we had Martin roofing solder up some copper door pans for our doors to sit in. It is probably overkill, but we also ran rubber and caulk below our copper door pan as well. Also, before seating the door in the pan, we adhered a thick self stick rubber membrane to the bottom of the aluminum sill such that it wouldn’t be in contact with the copper, which could potentially react and corrode the aluminum.
As far as aesthetics, Joey went with a 3/4 lite for our two front doors to try and have a little bit of a unique look.