We are replacing an exterior door this week. This particular door is south-facing, and during the rainy season here, it gets exposed to the rain. In fact, that’s why we are replacing the door, as it has rotted because of exposure to moisture.
Question 1: has anyone used marine paint to paint a door? The home supply company we got the door from suggested this. I have an oil-based marine primer and oil-based marine paint to coat the door. If you have used marine paints before on an exterior house door, do you have any tips before we get started? At some stage, we might get storm doors, but not now.
Question 2: What has been your experience using keyless locks for exterior doors? I went to two big-box stores today and searched on the internet. The biggest problem I have with keyless locks (e.g., keypad or biometric) is it is a single lock. Right now, we have a knob keyed lock and a dead-bolt keyed lock.
I fully appreciate a good swift kick of the door by someone with larceny in their heart would be enough to break through most residential doors regardless of locks. But, the simpleton in me thinks two keyed locks are better than a single keyless lock. Any thoughts?
We have keyless on all our doors on both our AZ house and ME cabin. We’re more concerned about ease of use than security because, as you say, anyone who wants to break in can/will. Locks are no deterrent. Doors aren’t the only point of entry.
That’s definitely a consideration. I took the “low key” (pun not intended) approach and got one of those fake rocks to hide a key in as a workaround in case we get locked out! It’s pretty easy to hide it in our yard, given the number of rocks etc we have.
I have one keyless knob on an interior door, and it is simply great. But it’s the exterior door, and it just seems to be one more protection, albeit a fairly weak one, to have two locks rather than one.
Ideally, if there were a keyless knob and deadbolt combo, I would have jumped on that. When I asked the fellow at Lowes about it today, he just laughed!
Looking forward to feedback on keyless locks. Need to do somethig to align our exterior doors better, maybe will consider switching locks while we are at it.
Our keyless is a deadbolt. The knob is just the original keyed version that you can lock from the inside by pushing the button but, of course, we leave the knob unlocked or that defeats the purpose of the keyless deadbolt.
I also like that we can program additional codes for the keyless. Whenever we have guests, we program the last four digits of one of their phones as the access code so we don’t have to give out our primary code, and we erase the temporary code when the guests leave. We can also remotely open/lock the doors which has come in handy when we’ve been at one place and needed to allow entry for someone at the other.
I will definitely get a keypad deadbolt with our next door. We have had them at rentals and they are just terrific (and programmed with our cell phone numbers for ease of remembering…smart landlords). Of course, that wouldn’t be our code at home.
Locks with keypads or biometric or whatever can be gotten in deadbolt and slip-latching door knob types. Deadbolt locks are generally considered higher security. For exterior doors, you generally want a deadbolt lock, but the slip-latching door knobs also typically installed can be gotten with or without locks.
With any lock, a reinforced strike plate and door frame can be used to increase resistance to kick-in attacks (some deadbolts come with reinforced strike plates). For installation of a strike plate in a typical door frame, the anchoring screws must be long enough to go into the framing stud, not the much weaker door frame.
I absolutely love our keyless lock. It is so much easier to use than remembering a key. We have a mechanical one not connected to our phone. The family has the main code and as has been mentioned we can give a temporary code to others.
+1 for the keyless lock! Combined with our keyless entry car keys, it means never having to fish in my purse for my keys. And I love that I can go out for a walk or run and not have to take a key with me. We also give out temporary codes to anyone we know that needs to access the house.
I’m realizing that for almost 30 years we’ve been using our garage door keypad as our “keyless lock” system. That’s how the kids let themselves in after school.
I don’t care so much of someone breaking in when I am not there because most things could be replaced. When I am in my place, I want to have deadbolt and multiple locks.
Do you mean that the door from your garage into your home is left unlocked? We’ve been warned by LEOs here and at our former home to not do that because it’s easy for crooks to get control of garage door openers. While we do have an outside keypad for our garage door, there’s also a keypad deadbolt on the door into the house.
If you can remove the door for the day to paint it that should help. We found that any oil base paint, but especially the marine grade oil base paint, tended to drip - or maybe we just weren’t used to oil based paint any more. If you can paint the door while it’s flat that will be easier. I do agree that marine grade paint/stain/varnish is worth the extra effort, especially since your door gets exposed to rain.
I love keypad locks. There are more expensive ones than Schlage, but I’ve been happy with their quality. We do not use the Wi-Fi type as I’ve read they can be too easily compromised. Multiple codes are nice if you need to let in someone when you’re not at home or are bedridden. You may have better luck finding deadbolt keypad locks with online stores than a local store.
Yes, that’s what we’ve always done in this house. (In upstate NY we actually were even more lax, but that was a different town and time.)
The door from hallway to garage only gets dead bolted when my husband is out of town and I get more cautious. It’s not a a great method, especially now that our area too is experiencing an increase of garage break-ins. So we’ve been discussing the idea of a keypad lock. Husband is also working on a scheme with security cameras.
This may sound odd, but it really worked for a friend. They took their steel door to an auto body paint shop and had it painted there. It looked fabulous, and they said the cost wasn’t too awful.
It was amazingly easy to work with paint. Durable and vibrant.