The front door on your home may just seem like wood and metal, yet there lies a lot of history and intrigue surrounding this primary portal. As a creator of quality custom wood and iron doors, you could say that we are passionate about our craft. Monarch Custom Doors specializes in creating custom exterior doors and windows for homes and businesses, as well as designing and fabricating a wide range of other features. From home theater entrances to property gates, we can help architects, designers, and builders to craft the perfect product. Today, we’ll look outside of our designer front doors at a few interesting facts surrounding doors. While not entirely helpful for creating the perfect product, these tidbits may help to inspire your next project. Worst case scenario, this blog may pay off big when participating in trivia night!

• Doors can be large. Multiple sources have cited that the biggest door in the world belongs to NASA at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Being able to move intact space shuttles in and out requires a lot of leeway, and this building actually holds four of these monstrosities. Each door is 716 feet high and is composed of 7 vertical panels and 4 horizontal panels. When people tell others to shut their door to avoid heating the entire neighborhood, chances were that they weren’t thinking of NASA’s scope of an entryway. Each door takes 45 minutes to completely open or close!
• Doors can also be heavy. Cathedrals and antiquated fortresses featured massive, heavy entryway systems that took multiple people to open and close them. While these doors look grand and intimidating, they often are not practical for convenient use. As such, smaller entry doors were placed within their mastodonic counterparts to allow users ease of entry. Referred to as wicket doors or gates, these smaller entryways were ideal in fortifications to allow for quick exits in order to perform raids or to let in small parties without risking vulnerability.
• They can be old, too. One amazing find by archaeologists revolves around one door that was found in Switzerland. This ancient discovery was described as elegant and solid and provided an effective way to protect against the elements. By counting the tree rings, scientists were able to determine that the tree is just over 5,000 years old! While our residential front doors are made to last, the term lifetime guarantee should stretch to one human life, or 1/50th of this door’s current age. Archeologists are currently working to date other doors that have been discovered, with one possibly dating back as far as 3700 BC!

Since we have inhabited man-made structures, doors have had the humble duty of keeping the proper temperatures inside and any dangers outside. The symbolism and meaning behind these devices have evolved and taken on more meaning than a wood plank could ever hope to hold. Next time, we’ll look at a few more interesting facts surrounding doors. As your custom door company, we’re proud to design and fabricate quality doors and windows to meet each customer’s unique needs. Monarch Custom Doors is here to turn your ideas into reality. Contact us today to see how we can help you!