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Most utility rooms come fully equipped with a door that closes the room off from the rest of the home. These doors can be made of various materials.
Discover the differences between the materials and which might be best for your home.
Here’s What Type of Door Can Be Used for a Utility Room:
Utility rooms have doors for a wide variety of reasons. They are also built with everything from insulated metal to single paneling wood. It honestly depends on the design of your utility room and how much you want to protect it. The location of the utility room plays a huge role in the answer.
Does a Utility Room Absolutely Need a Door?
A utility room is almost essential in today’s time.
Whether it holds your gas furnace, washer, and dryer, or electric water heater, these rooms can play crucial roles in the home.
As crucial as these rooms are, there is simply nothing about them easy. There is a huge range of factors that can determine if your utility room needs a door or not.
Starting with the location of the room. If your room is connected to the outside and can be accessed from outside the home, you’ll certainly need a door.
The door will need to be sturdy and durable enough to protect from the outdoor elements while also keeping intruders at bay.
Just because your utility room is connected to the outside, it doesn’t necessarily mean the room needs a door.
However, your appliances will be exposed to air, weather, and intruders.
This is likely something you want to prevent. Now, things take an entirely different turn if your utility room is installed inside the home.
Some utility rooms are in basements, whereas in smaller apartments the utility rooms are attached to the living rooms or kitchens.
These configurations bring in much different factors. For instance, what’s housed in the utility room. Appliances? Combustible machines?
These along with a multitude of other things can play a huge role in the answer to this question.
It is best to start with aesthetics and quality of life in the home.
If the utility room is attached to the kitchen or living room, you probably don’t want to be looking in at its unappealing appearance every time you walk by.
There is also the fact that most common appliances produce a lot of noise.
A proper door will correct both of these issues, keeping the room out of sight and the sound reduced.
If the utility room is in an unfinished basement, it might not even matter if it’s open for visibility or sound.
Other things that need to be considered are building codes and the type of appliances in the room.
When it comes right down to it, a utility room enclosed in the home is much better off without a door than a door.
This is especially true when fresh air venting needs to be considered.
Does a Utility Room Door Need to Be Vented?
As essential as utility rooms can be, they can also cause a whole host of future problems.
In some cases, they could cause your appliances to malfunction or run ineffectively.
Not only that but there are even scenarios when utility rooms can be dangerous.
Most homeowners would be shocked to learn about the number of yearly household fires related to improper or inadequate ventilation.
Utility room design and venting become even more crucial when propane or natural gas appliances are involved.
Many people are left with their jaws on the floor when they learn that natural gas appliances need approximately 10 times the volume of air compared to the volume of gas consumption.
Without the correct volume of air, all industry experts will tell you that gas appliances won’t properly combust.
And when they do, they might short cycle, causing the components to work much harder than necessary.
Combustion can be extremely technical and requires a basic understanding of chemistry.
Although you could sit and debate the topic all day, homeowners need to be aware of the fact that improper combustion can lead to the development of carbon monoxide.
Things grow even trickier when you start introducing multiple gas appliances. There is also moisture to worry about.
While moisture isn’t as dangerous at first, it can lead to the development of harmful mold and fungi later down the road.
If your utility room contains gas appliances, you might as well go ahead figure that you are going to need some type of ventilation.
Most gas-fed appliances are usually vented with exhaust flue pipes.
Even in these scenarios, it is still a good practice to offer additional ventilation.
A solid door with a 2 or 3-inch gap at the bottom might be all you need.
You might need to cut a vent into the door, or you might need a louvered door.
Things can grow tricky very fast, but the type of ventilation you need comes down to the appliances in the room, the size of the appliances, the size of the room, and state coding requirements
Different states can require different amounts of ventilation.
However, this is usually a practice that is taken care of during the initial building of the home or building.
A utility room with all electrical appliances like a microwave will still require ventilation to prevent future moisture issues.
How Wide Should a Utility Room Door Be?
Despite what a lot of people believe, a utility room should be one of the most functional and workable rooms in the entire home.
A lot of utility rooms are left unfinished with the studs exposed, meaning they probably aren’t painted, trimmed, or neatened to the standards of the other rooms.
However, that doesn’t mean that they still aren’t functional or workable. A room can be left unfinished and still be 100% functional.
In fact, it’s all-around better if these rooms are left unfinished to provide easy access.
It’s just that most guests never see the insides of these rooms and homeowners don’t spend a lot of time in them.
That and the fact that they are only intended to house appliances leaves many homeowners not caring how pretty they are.
Despite their lack of interior decoration, utility rooms are one of the more important rooms of the entire home.
Therefore, a lot of precise measuring and heavy consideration goes into their design.
They need to be designed to comfortably house appliances as well as provide enough ventilation.
Although a lot of time is spent considering the size of the room itself, there is little value placed on the size of the doorway.
This would be a huge mistake because an improperly sized doorway can lead to a whole load of future issues.
The biggest is that you won’t be able to successfully replace failing appliances without making major alterations.
It is best to take the time during the designing stages to ensure that the doorway is properly sized.
That being said, there is a whole slew of factors that will end up determining the size of the doorway.
The size of the appliances, the size of the home, the type of appliances, the amount of ventilation required for appliances, and even the location of the room itself will play a role.
With that in mind, there are some key standard sizes that will be found in all homes.
According to industry experts, standard door widths for interior doors are a minimum of 32 inches.
Some homes will even use more narrow designs like the 28 or 24-inch doors. It can come down to codes and the space you are allotted to play with.
The standard height for a door that leads from one room to the other is 80 inches. 78″ doors are also sometimes used for utility setups, which are commonly referred to as 6/6 doors.
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