Three pieces that answer the questions we hear most often at the showroom counter, from measuring a rough opening to matching hardware across a whole house.
Measuring
How to check a rough opening for a standard 813mm or 914mm frame, and where a custom width actually saves you trouble.
Materials
A plain comparison for Gauteng and coastal homes, covering humidity, sealing schedules and how each option ages on an exterior wall.
Hardware
Backset, stile width and finish choices, plus why a cheap cylinder is the first part to fail on a busy entrance door.
A door is one of the few things in a house you touch every single day. It also has to survive humidity swings, a shifting foundation and a hinge that gets used a few thousand times a year. That is the standard we work to, and it shapes how we quote, cut and fit every unit.
Standard 813mm and 914mm openings cover most rooms, but brickwork rarely ends up square. We ask for three width readings and two height readings per opening before cutting, so a leaf does not arrive too tight to plane or too loose to seal.
Meranti takes paint and stain evenly and holds a screw well. Oak veneer suits a visible interior where grain matters. Aluminium makes more sense on a west-facing exterior wall in a coastal suburb, where a timber door would need re-sealing every year.
Mismatched handles and pitted cylinders are the most common complaint we hear about other installs. We group lever handles, mortice locks and cylinders by finish and backset, and check the backset against the door stile width before anything leaves the yard.
Hanging doors before tiling or painting usually ends in scratched leaves and swollen bottoms. We sequence fitting after floor finishes are down and before the final paint coat, and we tell you what to seal on all six faces if you are fitting yourself.
Send a door schedule with opening sizes, swing direction and finish notes and you get a written quote back covering leaves, frames, architraves and hardware. Trade clients running townhouse developments can request bulk pricing on the same schedule.
Stock items move quickly out of Johannesburg; custom pivot units and non-standard widths take longer because the frame is built to your rough opening. We confirm the lead time in writing before you commit, so it lines up with your building programme.
If you want the reasoning behind our fitting sequence in more detail, it is set out on the approach page. Contractors working on multi-unit sites can see how we handle staged deliveries on for teams.