Clint and I sometimes get email questions or comments about our blog posts. We always enjoy reading these as we are delighted that our readers want to engage with us.
A recent email came in about my blog post around our wine cellar project. After typing out the response and pressing the send key, I thought that many of our dear readers may also be interested in my response.
Hi ________,Always great to hear from a fellow wine enthusiast. I ran into the same issue you did when I started to look for wine cellar doors. They were quite pricey. So I went another route – I just looked for exterior grade doors. There is not much difference between a wine cellar and exterior door besides the style, all concerns of insulation etc are there. Once I did this, the selection not only expanded, but so did the price ranges. I got the door pictured in the blog entry from ETO Doors (www.etodoors.com). They are based out of LA so depending where you live, the shipping costs will vary and so will whether you have to pay taxes.The door I got was $599, getting it pre-hung was $270 (well worth it as they did all the weather stripping etc and made sure there was a great seal), and shipping to my location was $114. I had to pay sales tax of ~$71 because I live in California. Great price for a solid mahogany door – the door was very substantial (heavy).ETO Doors is great about giving an estimate via email as long as you go onto the website and pick out exactly what you want and send them email or call – they can get you a quote quite quickly. The door ships from a manufacturing plant they have in Brazil from what I understand. The lead time was 3-4 weeks and really depends on what time of year you order – patience is required but I was busy with so many other things that it felt like one day, it just arrived on our driveway.Make sure you have a good staging area for the arrival of the door, it comes with very substantial packaging to ensure the door arrives in good condition. It took up a whole driveway slot for a while until we were able to get our contractor to install it.Good luck with your cellar project and love to see pictures of it when its done.Thanks for visiting Stark Insider,Loni
In this particular case, the reader was interested in finding out from where I got the wine cellar door. You’ll find that sometimes a name is just a name. The same exterior grade door that is deemed a “wine cellar door” may be priced much higher because the marketing person has figured out that that particular segment of the market has a more inelastic demand curve. Same thing those for invitations to a party, call them “wedding invitation” and you’ll probably be paying at least twice as much for the same card stock. I am a believer of paying for quality and service and for those, I don’t like to compromise. It is nice to see beyond the name and imagine the potential.
The wine cellar door example was not that far fetched. The item I am most proud of in our home is a long piece of copper drain piping that I am using as an outdoor drapery rod from Home Depot for our Sunbrella drapes in our courtyard.
