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Our customer Reina had just moved to Houston and needed a private space for her home office.  Like many of our customers, Reina had an open formal living or dining room that she was not using for that purpose.   Like many of our customers, Reina needed to convert the space into a home office!

We proposed installing double French doors in the arched opening between the entry hall and the home office space.  To give her the privacy she wanted in the office, and the ability to “close the doors” at the end of the work-day, we chose frosted glass for the French doors.  The doors, manufactured by Woodgrain, came from the factory with the frosted glass installed.  Frosted glass is great for privacy, but it is a cool element for interior design.  Reina’s home is a cross between contemporary and classic, so the frosted glass blends in nicely as an element of the interior design.

The opening in the home was about 67″ wide, so Interior Door Concepts selected a pair of 30″ wide doors for the opening.  We built a jamb to install on the surface of the sheetrock that covers the arched opening.   In addition to providing a location to hang the doors, the jamb takes up the space on the arched opening that the doors themselves do not fill.  There are a variety of ways to construct the jamb to fill the arch, and Interior Door Concepts will use one of its several styles of jamb, depending on the size of the opening.

Interior Door Concepts can use a variety of casing styles to match what is in the home.  In the case of Reina’s home, we used a colonial style casing.  Colonial casing has evolved through the years, so some of the older homes have colonial casing that does not match the modern style exactly.  Usually, the customer is content with the current standard, but we have the ability to have the older style colonial casing re-created to match the other casing in a home.  There is an additional charge for the custom casing, but it is a small portion of the overall project.

Reina also selected the traditional way of closing the French doors.  You’ll notice on the “after” photo a raised moulding down the middle of the two doors.  This moulding is called a T-astragal, and is attached permanently to one of the two doors.  T-astragals serve several important purposes.  First, they give the active door a place to latch closed.  Second, they provide a place for the flush bolt to be mortised into the secondary door.  Finally, the T-astragal fills the gap between the two doors so noise is reduced and so that people cannot peek through the gap.

As with most our projects, Interior Door Concepts brought the doors and materials to Reina’s home pre-painted.  Pre-painting the doors and materials in our shop with Sherwin-Williams brand Kem-Aqua water borne lacquer.  This is a great paint product.  It cures to finish hardness in hours instead of the weeks that latex or enamel paint take to cure.  Kem-Aqua is also a low VOC paint, so it contributes less to Houston’s air pollution than other types of paint.

Reina was pleased with her doors and the home office that was created with the doors.  If you’d like a similar installation in your home, please give us a call at 713-467-3667.

Take care,

Dave