Your home is likely the most expensive thing you’ve ever purchased. As such, it’s your biggest asset, and its value should be important to you. Specifically, increasing your home’s value over time should be a major focus.
There are a lot of reasons for that, and we’ll dive into those later, but we specifically want to cover one simple change that can increase your home’s value in a surprising number of ways, regardless of what you plan on doing with it in the future.
Buying iron doors for your entryways.
Here’s why iron doors are a great investment for your home’s value and why you should consider getting one for your house.
Why Worry About Increasing Your Home’s Value?
Before we dive into what iron doors can do for your home’s value, let’s talk about why you should worry about it in the first place.
As we said, your home is probably your most valuable asset. As such, there’s the obvious desire to get as much out of it as possible when it’s time to sell it. That will make the investment all that much better. However, why does it matter if you plan on making it your forever home? What if you don’t want to sell it?
Well, consider how unpredictable life is.
Even if it’s your forever home, you might end up getting sick, experiencing a harsh economic downturn, or going through something else that forces you to downsize, or you might even need to sell it to pay for elderly care fees later on.
That’s not all, though. If you have children, and they inherit your home, they might already be old enough that they’re well established on their own, and they might not want your home.
Wouldn’t you prefer to do everything you can to make sure they get the most out of it to cover any final costs you might have, as well as to help them well into the future?
Replacing your doors with iron doors won’t automatically increase your home value so much that it makes all those things possible on its own, but it’s a cost-effective way to add quite a bit of value, and when paired with other small changes, the results can be fairly dramatic.
Not to mention, value doesn’t always have to be counted in a monetary sense. There are several ways iron doors benefit your home in valuable ways that have nothing to do with the money in a direct sense.
How Iron Doors Add Monetary Value to Your Home
First, we’ll cover the benefits most of you want to know about. How do iron doors add value to your home in a financial sense? Well, there are quite a few ways, and some of them overlap with the more abstract value additions, as well.
1: Aesthetic Appeal for Buyers
An iron door isn’t the most common door type anymore. Cheap, cookie-cutter options have been the norm for years. So, imagine how excited homebuyers will be to see a home that strays from that norm and has a luxurious, well-crafted, highly detailed iron door at the main entrance.
When a buyer arrives for a walkthrough, they see the home from the curb, but the first up-close look they get is at your main entryway.
You want that first experience to exude luxury and quality and not a budget door with no character or sense of charm.
This does have a psychological effect that will help persuade them to pay closer to the asking price.
2: Long-Term Investment
One of the things a homebuyer looks at when they’re considering a home is how many things they’ll have to pay for going forward. This is why they like to see that the plumbing is up to date, the HVAC system is relatively new, and other expensive things are unlikely to need replacements any time soon. They’re making one of the biggest investments of their lives. They don’t want to deal with costly repairs in the next year or two.
However, that mindset expands well beyond the big things.
Homebuyers also want to know that the smaller parts of the home are going to last a long time without needing repairs or replacements shortly after the home transaction is closed.
That goes for items such as the appliances, windows, and, yes – the doors.
Luckily, that’s not a problem with iron doors.
With minimal upkeep, iron doors can last generations. You can purchase an iron door today as a first-time homebuyer, and your grandkids can inherit the same home with the same iron door installed 50 years from now without any signs of wear that affect its function.
That means a lot for homebuyers because it’s something they instantly know they won’t have to worry about.
3: Repair and Maintenance Costs
Homebuyers aren’t just worried about having to replace things. They don’t want to have to pour money into repairing or maintaining them, either.
With hardwood doors, longevity isn’t an issue if they’re taken care of, but they require a lot of extensive maintenance. Other types of doors will fall apart within a decade or two.
An iron door not only lasts practically forever, but it also doesn’t require any expensive upkeep.
At most, the homebuyer will want to keep the door clean and repaint any areas that get chipped or worn off over time. The door itself will need practically zero maintenance. They don’t even have to worry about it being time-consuming.
Touch-ups for iron doors are typically done in small areas as needed. They only need a little piece of sandpaper to knock off spots of surface rust and a small amount of matching paint to reseal the coating.
Compare that to a hardwood door that requires tons of intricate sanding and plenty of finishing materials to make it look brand new, and you can see where the value comes in.
How Iron Doors Add Non-Financial Value or Indirect Financial Value
The three benefits we listed above are more likely to make a homebuyer pay you more in the event of a sale, but that doesn’t matter as much if you plan to live in your home throughout your life. So, why worry about buying an iron door, then?
Well, value isn’t always monetary, and there are some indirect monetary benefits that you get from iron doors, too.
Let’s take a look at the value iron doors add to your property if you DON’T plan on moving.
1: Less Maintenance
This is a big one. Your time is more valuable than your bank account. Do you want to spend tons of it scrubbing and sanding doors to avoid needing replacements?
With hardwood doors, you have to sand them very carefully, and it takes hours. Then, you have to reapply finishes. The entire process can take a full day. That’s a day of your life that you spend sanding a door and smearing chemicals on it just to protect it.
An iron door doesn’t require any of that. As we mentioned in the previous section, iron door maintenance is minimal. You might need to lightly sand a few small areas every few years to knock off surface rust, and you might need to use a normal paintbrush to reapply a small amount of paint in areas that have chipped, but that only takes a few minutes at most.
You don’t need to remove the door from its hinges, you don’t need any special equipment, and overall, you can get your door back to its brand-new appearance in less time than it takes to make a pot of coffee.
In the grand scheme of things, maintenance time doesn’t seem like a major loss, but it adds up, and you don’t get that time back.
2: Saving on Materials
You save time by not having to do as much maintenance, but you also save money. Let’s use a hardwood door as an example again.
Let’s say you need to refinish your hardwood door annually to maintain it for as long as possible. Besides the time you need to invest in it, you also need a palm sander, various kinds of sandpaper to get a good raw finish on the door, an oil or paint to add color and a protective layer to it, and usually you’ll need a final transparent layer that protects that protective layer.
That’s a lot, and the only thing you’re going to reuse is the palm sander. So, let’s say you need to spend $100 a year maintaining that hardwood door, and you manage to keep the same door for 50 years. That’s $5000 you’ve spent on maintaining a door, even if it was just a small expense once a year.
In comparison, doing the same annual maintenance to an iron door once a year is a lot cheaper. You’ll only need to do small touch-ups where the paint chips and surface rust builds up if you keep it clean.
That requires maybe a sheet of sandpaper to knock off the surface rust, and then you can get a sample can of paint that matches your door for less than $5. Your overall annual cost is less than $10, but we’ll round it up to keep it fair.
That’s less than $500 over 50 years IF you throw away your maintenance materials every year. If you’re frugal, a pack of sandpaper only used for that purpose will last for years, and you might be able to keep the paint from drying out for another year or two. You can easily cut your lifetime maintenance costs down to a quarter of that $500 estimate.
So, you do get financial benefits.
3: Security
It’s a lot easier to break into a wood or hollow metal door than it is to break into an iron door. With a few good kicks, a wood door can be torn from its hinges, and steel or aluminum doors can be broken through a lot easier than you think because they’re hollow.
An iron door is solid iron, and the glass inserts are placed in a way that prevents them from being broken to access locks. So, purchasing an iron door is a phenomenal way of increasing your front door security.
This protects you in more ways than one. Sure, your valuables are protected, which saves you from a lot of financial and emotional problems, but you and your family are protected as well, and that’s far more important than the financial benefits.
4: No Need for Replacements
With every other type of door, slight mishaps can require a full replacement. Considering how much doors cost, that is expensive. Even hardwood doors, which are considered to be life-long door options, can be destroyed by moisture if you don’t take care of them. They can warp and need a replacement quickly.
With an iron door, there is no practical reason for you to replace the door. Sure, the glass might be broken from a stray baseball when the neighborhood kids are outdoors playing, but that’s a relatively cheap repair. The door itself isn’t going anywhere.
For your iron door to become so damaged, you need to replace it, you’d have to neglect it for decades. Even if you do neglect it, they’re so resilient that you can still probably put some elbow grease into it, and it’ll look great within a few hours.
This pays off financially by sparing you from having to buy a new door, boosts your home value, and saves you a ton of time dealing with a new door installation.
Where to Buy Iron Doors to Boost Your Home’s Value
If you’re convinced that an iron door is the right choice for you, you probably want to know where the best place is to buy one.
That would be Wholesale Iron Doors. We bring you the best prices on high-quality iron doors in all styles and designs, and you’re sure to find an option that you’ll love.