Hey Friends!
I’m preparing to replace all the interior doors in my apartment (Chicago), and I am wondering if the laundry and furnace rooms require special doors.
Ideally, I would love to slap some solid core doors on there to reduce sound, but it’s unclear to me if I need to install doors with ventilation, and if so, how much.
Does anyone know what best practices are here?
Thank you all <3
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Hard to answer without knowing what you have there already. Those rooms definitely need ventilation but I don’t usually see that ventilation being part of am interior door I imagine you could put on basically any solid core that fits.
Also Chicago has a history of unique and expensive antique door hardware so if your house is old you might want to do some googling of your knobs, lock sets, and hinges and either donate them to a place that deals in antique house parts or sell them online.
Yeah, our place is not THAT old. I think it was built around 1993.
Currently, both the laundry closet and the furnace closet have hollow-cored doors with a small louvered panel on the bottom half of them. Our neighbor from the downstairs apartment replaced the door to their laundry closet and put in solid doors with no (apparent) ventilation, which sparked the thought that maybe a louvered door might not be needed
Replace what you have with similar is usually logical. Modern laundry usually has a vent, so at least a gap at the bottom of the door is necessary. Furnace room will have more important code requirements. Old furaces and water heaters drew air from the room. That’s no longer allowed in new appliances. So if they do draw from the room, you must have ventilation. If not, it doesn’t matter / isn’t required. Either way, that doesn’t prevent you from installing solid doors. Also, you can vent through the interior wall if you don’t want to cut into your door.
Interesting… how would you set up ventilation on the interior wall? Just making sure there is some hole somewhere?
Find the studs, block out a rectangle of necessary size to mount vent grills on both sides. Essentially, make your own hole in the wall and add 2x4 to the side(s), top, and bottom. If you plan it right, you won’t need to cut open the wall more than the finished hole size.
Not all modern furnaces and water heaters pull in outside air. Less expensive gas furnaces may still use interior air for combustion and almost all gas water heaters will. Heat pump water heaters absolutely need ventilation to work correctly as well.
I was trying to not be too pedantic, but correct. Good points.
I’ve just finished replacing all the doors in my condo and another thing to keep in mind is fitting the exact dimensions. If you’re going pre-hung you should have more flexibility, but if you’re keeping the door jambs and just getting new door slabs then you’ll want to measure very precisely. I assumed mine were close enough to standard widths 24”, 30” etc. and they were slightly smaller so I ended up having to trim a quarter inch off the doors to make them fit.
Thankfully, we are having a contractor put them in. I just need to order the right doors :p
I’m curious why you are replacing all the old doors. Is this an aesthetics thing? They can’t be painted?
For the furnace door, you probably need a fire-rated door. Finding that information can always be tricky. Calling townhall can open up a can of worms. Asking at a big box store, you’ll get a bunch of clueless workers.
We are replacing the doors because, currently, we have a bunch of cheap, flat, hollow-cored doors that look terrible. We wanted to upgrade to some nicer doors. Both rooms currently have hollow-core doors with a small Louvered panel at the bottom.
Gotcha. I definitely do recommend solid core doors. The flippers I bought my place from made a lot of questionable choices, mostly driven by saving a buck, but they did install solid core doors everywhere and it makes a big difference.
