Door installation and repair in Bolton

It describes how a door is used and regulated, not what it is made of. Any door in a building where the public, staff or goods pass through — a shop entrance, a stairwell exit, a warehouse dock, a hospital corridor — is a commercial door, and it has to satisfy the Ontario Building Code, its fire rating if it has one, and accessibility requirements. The material follows from the job the opening does.

Treat it as one if the opening is no longer secure, no longer weathertight, or has glass left in the frame that can still fall. A cracked pane that is intact and above head height can usually wait for a scheduled visit; a shattered storefront at street level cannot, and neither can a fire exit whose glass is gone. The test we use on the phone is simple: can the building be locked and left tonight? If not, it is an emergency and we board it up.

Tempered glass is roughly four times the strength of the same thickness of ordinary annealed glass, and when it does fail it breaks into small blunt pieces rather than shards. That is a safety property, not a security one: tempered glass still comes out of the frame. Where the concern is forced entry or holding the glass in place after impact, the answer is laminated glass — two lites bonded to a plastic interlayer — or a security film applied to the glass already in the opening.

We repair them, and most of our steel-door calls are repairs. Frames get straightened and re-anchored, rusted bottom rails cut out and new sections welded in, hinges and closers replaced, latches and strikes realigned, and kick plates and astragals fitted. A hollow metal opening is worth repairing precisely because every part of it is a part — replacement is the answer when the frame is beyond straightening or the leaf has rusted through.

Typically 4–6 weeks to produce the door once shop drawings are approved, then 1–2 weeks to schedule the job and install it — so around 5–8 weeks in total, depending on the size of the project. An automatic slider runs to the longer end because the operator, the framing and the glass all have to arrive together. A standard automatic door operator is a different matter entirely: those are stock items, so fitting one to a door that already hangs correctly is usually 2–3 days rather than weeks. Emergency repairs are a different clock again and are dispatched 24/7. On site, a single automatic entrance is usually installed in a day; a full package on a general contractor's build runs over several weeks.

Typically 4–6 weeks to produce a labelled door and frame once the shop drawings are approved, then 1–2 weeks to schedule the job and install it, depending on the size of the project. Certified assemblies are made to order with the hardware prep in the leaf, so the schedule is set by the fabrication rather than the installation. Inspections and most repairs, by contrast, are scheduled in days. Hanging a single labelled door and frame is usually a day on site; a building's worth of rated openings on a new build is scheduled over several weeks with the general contractor.