Entry Door Installation

An entry door replacement is really three purchases wearing one price tag: curb appeal you see every day, security you hopefully never test, and a weather seal you feel every January. We install fiberglass and steel entry systems across Lancaster County and Chester County, from single doors to full units with sidelites and transoms. Fiberglass has become our usual recommendation: it does not dent, does not rust, insulates several times better than the old wood slab it replaces, and the current wood grain skins are convincing from a handshake away. Steel still wins on price and raw security, and loses at the bottom edge, where years of kicked snow and road salt eventually find bare metal. One honest note before any of it: if your current door is solid and just drafty, read our guide on [fixing a drafty front door](/blog/fix-drafty-front-door) first, because sometimes $40 of weatherstripping beats a $4,000 door, and we would rather tell you that today than after the invoice.

The door on the truck is half the product. The other half happens in the opening. Old doors come out and show us what twenty years of wind driven rain accomplished, and at the sill it is often rot: soft subfloor, a rotted rough sill, sometimes the bottoms of both jack studs. We cut that out and rebuild it before anything new goes in. Then the opening gets flashed the way the manuals say and the shortcuts skip: a sill pan first, so any water that ever sneaks past the door is routed back outside instead of into the floor, flashing tape up the jambs, and low expansion foam around the frame so it seals without bowing the jambs inward. The unit gets shimmed at the hinge and latch points, adjusted until the reveal is even all the way around and the latch clicks home with one finger, and the threshold set so the sweep seals without dragging. Masonry openings, common in the rowhomes we work on, play by their own rules: out of square brick, masonry anchors and mortar patching instead of nailing fins. Our [rowhome entry door in Coatesville](/projects/rowhome-entry-door-coatesville-pa) shows exactly that situation handled cleanly.

Sidelites and transoms turn a door into a wall of light, and they also turn the project into light structural work, because the rough opening gets wider and the header above it has to be verified for the new span before anything is ordered. Budget accordingly: complete installed entry doors run $2,200 to $5,500 across Lancaster County and Chester County, with sidelite and transom units living toward the top of that range. Two smaller notes that save money. A storm door added during the same visit costs noticeably less than a separate trip later, since the opening is prepped and we are already standing in front of it. And if a competing quote seems surprisingly low, ask one question: what is the flashing plan? A cheap install with no sill pan is a subfloor replacement on layaway.