We have a lanai off our master bedroom that opens onto a walled garden. There are two arches, each about 66" x 82", for passage from lanai to garden.
Originally, we intended to have those arches remain open but the mud daubers
*LOVE* to build on the lanai so I decided to enclose the arches with French screen doors. The lanai faces east and the summer morning sun is fierce here in Florida so the secondary reason was to diminish the sunlight.My total costs for both pairs was a bit over $550. Of that, $275 was for lumber (rough); the next biggest cost - about $90 -was for screening materials (7/16 x 1" aluminum channel material (set into dados in rails & stiles), the rest was for hinges, locks, surface bolts, some ply for a bending jig, door closers, weather strip material, paint, etc.
That seemed kinda much to me so I just Googled a few places to see what I could have bought them for. I'm glad I made them myself...prices ranged from about $400-$979. And that was just the doors. At one place - the $979 place - having them pre-hung doubled the price.
Admittedly, everything seems high to me now but I am semi-stuck in the past. What do you think, was $550 about right?
Here are a couple of pix...
One set of doors
As long as I'm posting, I might as well expound on some of the difficulties encountered. The primary one was that the masonry arches were not symmetrical; nor were they plumb. Hell, they weren't even symmetrical side to side; i.e., the short side on each of a door pair was different. That means I couldn't just measure the space to fill and build a door X4 to fit, had to make each one individually. A pain.
The lanai was tiled, did it years ago. I wanted the doors to abut something on all edges to help deter insects. That meant I had to cut down a strip of tile about 6" wide - concrete under it too - then retile so I had about a
3/4" drop for the door to close against. I could have avoided that by using door sweeps; if I had it to do over I might do that. Nah, better this way :)