Commercial door installation across Charlotte and six surrounding towns: new leaves into existing frames, and complete openings in new construction. Every order is placed against a measured opening rather than a drawing, because a frame that has moved will not accept a leaf cut to nominal size. Repairs to sound openings are a different trade.
Before the order goes out
The eleven things a survey establishes before anything is ordered. Work down it with a tape measure and the call afterwards takes a few minutes. Nothing here is stored, sent anywhere, or leaves this page.
Eleven items. Ticking them is for your own benefit — nothing is recorded.
With those eleven established, most openings can be placed in a category on the phone and given a working range, and the survey that follows is confirming rather than discovering. Where an item cannot be answered, the survey establishes it — that is what the visit is for.
Where this sits. Commercial Door Installation.
Leaves, frames and prep
The short version
A commercial door is an assembly, not a product. Leaf, frame, hardware prep and fire label all have to agree, and they are usually specified by different people from different documents at different times.
When an install goes wrong the fault is almost never in the fitting. It is that a 3'0" leaf was ordered for an opening measuring 2'10", or that the leaf arrived with a 161 prep while the schedule called for a mortise lock. We work backwards from that: somebody measures the opening, records the handing, reads the existing prep and photographs the frame before a purchase order exists.
Scope of work
The category splits cleanly into leaf-only work, where a sound frame stays, and opening work, where the frame is in scope and the wall comes into it. Which one you have is a measurement, not an opinion.
The most common request and the one most likely to go wrong. Frame throat, hinge locations, existing prep and squareness get verified before ordering, because a frame that has moved will not accept a leaf cut to nominal.
Frame set, leaf hung, hardware installed and adjusted, coordinated against the architect's door schedule. Schedule conflicts get flagged in writing rather than built.
Medium and wide stile entries into existing storefront framing, with pivots or offset hinges specified to match what the frame will actually carry.
16 and 18 gauge leaves in knock-down or welded frames, including the ones going into a masonry opening where nothing is plumb.
Solid core flush leaves for offices, corridors and back-of-house, machined to the hardware schedule before delivery rather than routed on site.
Reversing a swing is rarely a matter of moving hinges. It changes egress direction, closer arm type and strike location, and where egress is involved it is a code question first.
When the frame is sound, keeping it is the cheaper and better answer. We say so, and show the measurements that support it.
Before you replace anything
Most enquiries that arrive as "we need a new door" are one of three things, and only one of them is an installation job.
A closer that has stopped holding its adjustment, a strike that has worked loose, a latch no longer meeting where it was set. This is a repair. A commercial door repair contractor will be quicker and will cost you less than an installation crew, and we will say so rather than turn a repair into a replacement. It is not a line of business here.
Keeping a sound frame is the smaller invoice, and it is the more common answer than people expect. The leaf is then ordered against the measured opening, with the frame throat, the handing and the existing prep recorded first. That is leaf replacement, and it is installation work.
Corrosion at the floor line, a forced rabbet, a racked frame or failed anchors put the wall in scope, and so does widening an opening that will not meet clear width. At that point it is a frame job rather than a door job, and occasionally a compliance job driving both.
Which of the three it is gets established at the survey, not on the phone and not from a photograph. Where it turns out to be the first one, you get told that.
What drives the figure
No figures published. Two openings that look identical from the corridor can differ by a factor of three once the frame is measured.
| What moves the figure | Why it matters | What settles it |
|---|---|---|
| Whether the frame stays | Reusing a sound frame removes the single largest variable. Replacing it brings the wall into scope. | Survey — squareness, anchor condition, corrosion at the floor line |
| Leaf material and construction | Flush hollow metal, solid core wood and wide stile aluminum are three price bands and three lead times. | What the opening is and what the building already uses |
| Hardware set | Often the larger half. A Grade 1 exit device, closer and electrified strike can exceed the leaf. | Function specified from how the room is used |
| Label status | A rated assembly restricts what may be used and removes field modification as an option. | Reading the label on the leaf and the frame |
| Access and hours | An opening on a loading corridor at six and an opening in an occupied lobby are the same work under different constraints. | Your building's hours, agreed before the figure |
On this line of work
Every part of this business is arranged to stop the wrong thing being ordered. Unglamorous, and the entire value.
Architects' door schedules get read against what manufacturers actually build, and the conflicts come back in writing before anything ships.
Frame replacement is the bigger job and the bigger invoice. When the frame is sound we say so.
Sequence
Material, rough size, where it is, and what is wrong with what is there now. Usually enough to establish whether this is a leaf job or an opening job.
Grady walks the opening and records eleven things: measured size against nominal, frame material and throat, handing, hinge count and location, existing lock prep, closer type, threshold and floor condition, label, egress status, clear width against ADA 2010 Standards section 404, and anything electrified.
Priya writes the set against what the opening will accept and what the code requires, then puts it in front of you before it is ordered.
Specification, lead time per component, exact scope. Nothing is ordered until you have approved it.
Frame first if the frame is in scope, then leaf, then hardware, then adjustment. Occupied buildings get scheduled around your hours.
Swing, latch, closer speed, clear width and single-motion unlatching where it applies, all checked and recorded before we leave.
Elsewhere on the site
Installation is one line of five. The rest of what this crew covers — commercial doors, frames and hardware in Charlotte — runs through the five service lines, and the questions that come up weekly about all of them are collected in the answers page.
Corroded, racked and impact-damaged frames taken out of masonry and partition walls, and set square.
Read moreGrade 1 locks, closers, exit devices, hinges and electrified prep, scheduled by function before ordering.
Read moreClear width, opening force, hardware operability and single-motion egress, measured and corrected at the door.
Read moreLabelled openings replaced as tested assemblies, with leaf, frame, hardware and gasketing treated as one unit.
Read moreCoverage
Most of this work is in Charlotte itself, and the same routes run out to Concord, NC, Huntersville, NC, Indian Trail, NC and Matthews, NC. The survey and the install crew work the same corridor in a day, which is why the list is a short one.
Tell us the material, the rough size and what the opening is doing now, and you will hear whether it is a leaf, an opening, or a job for a different trade.