A woman at Dapto rang me one Thursday with five flat-pack doors leaning against her hallway wall. She'd bought them on the weekend, measured the old ones properly with a tape, and figured her husband would knock it over on the Sunday. He'd got about forty minutes into the first one before they both worked out something was wrong.
The doors were fine. The house was the problem. Built in about 1962, and not one of those five openings was square. Top of the jamb out by nine millimetres on one, the hinge stile bowed on another, and the fifth had been re-lined at some point so the frame was sitting proud of the plaster by half a centimetre.
That's most door jobs down here, honestly. People price a door and think they've priced the work. The door's the cheap bit.
What the door itself costs
A hollow-core flush door, the plain white ones, runs about $60 to $110 off the rack. That's what's in most Illawarra houses built after 1970 and it's perfectly fine for a bedroom or a linen cupboard. Knock on one and it sounds like a drum, because it mostly is one.
Solid-core is $150 to $350 depending on the finish. Heavier, quieter, doesn't flex when the kids slam it. Worth it on a main bedroom, a study or anywhere you want the noise to stop at the door. Once you're into moulded panel doors, colonial four-panels, or anything with glazing in it, you're $250 to $600 a leaf and it climbs from there if it's made to order.
Then there's matching an old house. Half the weatherboard places round Thirroul and Bulli have four-panel cedar doors from the twenties that nobody makes off the shelf anymore. You either find one at a salvage yard, get one built, or accept the new one won't quite match its neighbours. I usually tell people to hunt a salvage yard first, because a good secondhand door at a hundred bucks beats a custom one at eight.
The labour, which is the actual number
Hanging a door into an existing frame that's in reasonable shape: $150 to $300 a door, supplied hardware not included. That's planing the leaf to the opening, cutting and fitting three hinges, mortising the latch, drilling for the handle, and hanging it so it swings shut without drifting and closes with the same gap top and bottom.
The gap is the whole trade, really. You want about 3mm around the sides and top and enough underneath to clear the carpet or the floor covering without letting a southerly whistle through. Get that even and the door looks like it grew there. Get it wrong by two millimetres on one side and everyone who walks past notices without knowing why.
Where the price goes up is when the frame's had it. Rot at the bottom of a jamb near a wet area, a frame that's been kicked out of plumb by a settling stump, or the classic where three coats of paint have built up so thick the door binds on the stop. A new frame with the architraves off and back on is another $250 to $500 an opening, plus painting.
Prehung is the other option and I'll recommend it more often than people expect. You buy the door already hung in its own frame, the old frame comes out with the architraves, the new unit goes in packed and plumb, and you're not fighting sixty years of somebody else's decisions. Costs more in materials, saves enough labour that on a whole-house job it often lands cheaper overall. On the Dapto job we went prehung on three of the five and hung the other two into frames that were still true.
Hardware, which people forget entirely
A basic passage set, the round-knob or lever handle with a latch and no lock, is $25 to $70. A decent lever in a brushed finish that won't go chalky is more like $60 to $150. Privacy sets for bathrooms with the little turn-button, add a bit. Proper mortise locks on a heavier door, $150 and up.
Buy the hardware before I come, or tell me what you want and I'll grab it. What you don't want is me hanging five doors and then coming back a fortnight later to fit handles you've since bought online, because that's a second call-out for twenty minutes of work.
Cavity sliders and the ones that cost real money
Someone asks about a cavity slider on nearly every hallway job. They're brilliant where a swinging door eats the only usable wall in a small bathroom or laundry. They're also $1,200 to $2,500 an opening installed, because the wall has to come apart, the cavity unit gets framed in, and the plaster and cornice get made good afterwards. That's a wall job with a door in it, not a door job.
Bifolds on a wardrobe sit somewhere in the middle. Sliding robe doors on tracks, cheaper again, but the track has to be dead level or they'll roll open on their own all night.
Where this crosses into a bigger job
If the opening itself is changing size, widening a doorway, moving it along a wall, filling one in, that's framing work and it needs someone who knows whether the wall's holding anything up. I've written up what's involved in taking a wall out if that's where you're heading, because a widened opening in a load-bearing wall is that job in miniature.
External doors are a different conversation again. Weather, security, and around here salt. The same logic about rot versus neglect that I go through in the timber window piece applies to a front door frame, and the fix is usually cheaper than the quote you're holding.
On licensing: hanging a couple of doors is well under the threshold where you need a licensed builder, so a good handyman can do it and do it well. Once you're changing structure or the job's over $5,000 all up you need someone licensed, and the NSW rules on that are worth a two-minute read before you hire anyone. I've gone through where that line sits in the carpenter versus handyman post. We do both, so it's not a question you have to answer before you ring.
A rough number for a whole house
Five internal doors, hollow core, hung into existing frames that are behaving, hardware supplied by you: call it $900 to $1,500 in labour. Same five as prehung units with new frames and architraves, ready for the painter: more like $2,500 to $4,000 all up.
That second number surprises people. It's also the one that ends up looking right in ten years, because the frames are square and the doors aren't fighting them.
Doors are the sort of thing you walk past forty times a day and only notice when they're wrong. That's the doors and windows part of what we do, Helensburgh through to Nowra. Give Dave a bell on 0414 007 351 or send through how many you've got and I'll have a look at the frames before you buy a thing.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0414 007 351.
