The story so far… 

A couple years ago I had new windows installed and originally they were going to install a new back door as well because the existing back door, meaning this one:

…that old back door was leaky as hell and let in lots of outside air. But when the engineer came to do the final measurements, they decided that for some reason replacing that door was not something they could do, so they only replaced five of my windows.

In retrospect, I think I dodged a bullet because when I saw the revised estimate they were going to charge $4000 just to replace that door, and had they done so, they would have removed the storm door that I had just had installed a few months earlier and I would have had to have someone else come and re-install it.

So fast forward to a couple weeks ago and I got an estimate from a handyman and his back door man of $2000 to replace the back door and included in that price was reinstallation of my existing storm door.

Well, on Monday Stan, the back door man, came to do the installation along with the handyman Bobby.

I thought it should take a couple hours with the two of them, but as it turned out, Bobby left and Stan did most of the installation himself.

Here is how it looked once he had the doors removed.

Happily, Monday was a fairly mild day with the temperature climbing into the 50s, so it didn’t get too cold inside.

After two hours, which was about noon time, I asked Stan for an estimate of his completion time, and he expected to be done by about 3:00 PM. 

There was a nervous moment when, after he had the new door installed, I heard him mumble that the storm door didn’t fit. But it turned out that he meant the door knobs collided. Somehow he worked around that and he was in fact finished by 3:00 PM.

He cleaned everything up nicely as well.

And I’m happy to report that in the ensuing days when the temperature outside has dropped into the low 30s, the kitchen no longer feels like a meat locker. There’s barely any cold radiating in from the new door.

 

And as a bonus, the new door has a built-in blind and a dead bolt that’s easy to lock.