Brick Anew January 14, 2013

Fireplace Doors Home Depot – Hot Tips and A Review of their Selection, Pricing, and Support

The goal of this review is to give you the information to get the best door at the best price from Home Depot. The keys to getting the best door are:

1. Determine the type of fireplace in your home.
2. Measure your fireplace and see whether you need a small, medium, or large door.
3. Set up the HD page for easy shopping.
4. Pick Your Door

Here is a chart rating our experience with buying a fireplace door from home depot:

Step 1: Determine what kind of fireplace you have.

Note: Home Depot only carries doors for Masonry Fireplaces (brick / stone firebox and chimney) and they only sell fireplace doors online.

Important: Home Depot DOES NOT carry doors for Prefabricated, Zero Clearance, Factory Built Fireplaces (metal firebox and chimney) So if you have a factory built fireplace (EG: Heatilator, Superior, Majestic, etc.) you will need to find another source for your doors. Tip: You may want to check out Buying Doors for your Factory Built Prefab Fireplace. Lots of good information and comparisons.

Masonry Fireplace: Brick Firebox and Chimney Home Depot Fireplace Doors work on this type of fireplace	Factory Fireplace: Metal Firebox (with    refractory panels) Examples are Heatilator, Lennox, Majestic, FMI Home Depot Doors DO NOT work on this type of fireplace

Why doesn’t Home Depot (and other Big Box Stores) sell doors for factory fireplaces? Because these doors must be fitted correctly and meet certain codes and standards. This means that for the majority of factory fireplaces the doors must be custom made. Typically these types of fireplaces and doors require a higher level of support that a mass merchant can offer. This is an easy DIY project once you get the correct door.

Step 2 : Determine the opening size of your fireplace.

As an example let’s find a basic fireplace door from Home Depot for the fireplace below. It’s opening measures 40 ¾ x 25 ½.

I could not find any information on the Home Depot site regarding how to measure your fireplace, so here is a link from Pleasant Hearth.

We need to find the right size door for our fireplace. Unfortunately Home Depot makes this difficult. They only list part of the specs on their website – the largest size fireplace a door will fit. This can cause a problem as we will see later. A fireplace size that is too small and your door will not fit right. This is the big issue with all fireplace doors – a 1/8” can be the difference between a door fitting or being returned. Remember metal, brick, and glass doesn’t stretch or shrink.

To save you some time, here is the sizing chart on the Pleasant Hearth Website – it applies to all doors Home Depot sells: GHP Does a much better job of helping you out.

Based on the GHP chart it looks like I need a large sized door for my 40 ¾ x 25 ½ fireplace. I will be cutting it close. As you can see the GHP website makes it very plain that your fireplace must fall within the range of sizes listed, whereas HD just gives you the maximum size fireplace the door will fit.

It is VERY important that your fireplace is in the range of sizes listed on the chart above. Below are some examples of what can happen if you don’t follow the sizing chart.

The first example is of a fireplace that is 23 ½ “ high without the riser bar or a 25 ½” fireplace with the riser bar. Notice how you can see brick at the top of the opening.

Another reason that proper fit is important is that the bar on the back of the door that holds the mesh doors sticks out about an inch. It must fit in the opening of your fireplace or the frame of your door will stick out almost 1 inch.

Step 3: Set up the HD page for easy shopping 

If you start out at Home Depot’s home page good luck finding the fireplace doors intuitively. You must follow the following path: homedepot.com>Building Materials>Heating Cooling>Fireplaces>Fireplace Doors

Most people will head to the search bar and key in fireplace doors. The following page comes up:

This gives us every door Home Depot sells (all 53). This is not easy to shop. One reason is your are not in the fireplace door category. The search results page is hard to shop. Personally this is not how I like to shop. I prefer Good Better Best Sorted Low to High.

To shop Home Depot’s fireplace doors like this:

1. Go to the top and click on the fireplace door category. This takes you to the right part of the website and gives you more options. Here is a link.
2. Look on the left hand side and scroll down under “Refine” until you get to the size filter. Click your size.

3. Then go back to the top and sort by price from low to high. Now you can see all the doors for your fireplace on one page with the entry level door first. We have 16 doors priced from $269 to $799 to choose from. How about that! It looks like this:

Note: If you filter by the Fireplace Height (25.5”) You do not get all of the Large doors that will fit the fireplace. If you filter by size and height you only get 1 door – The Clairmont. So obviously the filters are not working for this category. All of the Pleasant Hearth Doors are sized the same so all large doors should fit.

Since a low price is the primary reason to buy fireplace door from Home Depot, let’s see what they have to offer as an entry level price point for our fireplace. Looks like the Alpine is our opening price point door.

Tip: HD only provides one picture and once the picture is opened it seems to be a low res picture that makes it very hard to see any detail of the door. Here is a link to the GHP Pleasant Hearth website with more detailed pics.

OK, here is one of my pet peeves with the SML sizing, and that is the huge overlap that can occur. I prefer more fireplace and less door. Here is what I am talking about…

The actual opening dimensions of the Alpine are 36” x 24”. That means I have 7 ½” of frame on the sides (3 ¾ Each Side) and 9” of frame on the top (5”) and bottom (4”). That is ALOT of frame. This is the way mass merchants can use a few sizes to fit a lot of fireplaces. It’s not bad or deceiving, but it can take up a lot of your fireplace. Check out the picture below. On the left is the Alpine Door from Home Depot on our 40 ¾ x 25 ½” fireplace and on the right is a door custom made inside fit door. Notice the red dashed lines – that is how much bigger the door from Home Depot is as compared to a custom made door.

Now let’s look at the pricing. $269 delivered to your house – that’s a good price.

Compare Prices to other Big Box Mass Merchants

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Returns for items purchased on Homedepot.com:

For your convenience, items purchased on homedepot.com can be returned to any of our retail stores nationwide. *

• Credit will be issued immediately and no return shipping charges will be incurred.
• A refund will be issued to the original form of payment:
• If returned to the store, credit will be issued at the time of return and no return shipping charges will be incurred by you.
• If returned to the .com warehouse, credit will be issued at the time the return is received in our warehouse.
• Original shipping charges will be refunded if there was an error on the part of homedepot.com.

As you can see, buying your fireplace doors from Home Depot has its advantages and pitfalls. If you have a masonry door, and you do not need a lot of support and you are not picky about the exactness of your fit, Home Depot could be a great and inexpensive solution. Don’t bother looking for factory built fireplace doors at Home Depot as they only stock small, medium, and large doors for masonry fireplaces only. If you have a factory built fireplace, or you want to make sure you get a door that properly fits your fireplace, we cannot recommend Home Depot. Because while their prices are indeed low, their site is too hard to shop, only offers masonry doors, and uses a small, medium, and large sizing method that we think is inadequate to provide you with a door that fits properly, and would maximize your fireplace’s full potential.