Choosing the Right Sized Door Overhang For Your Home

Why Does Door Overhang For Your Home Matter?
When considering the aesthetics of the exterior of your home, there are few areas more eye-catching than your front door. It is the entry point to your humble abode, and the central focus of your curb appeal.

Imagine that you have one of our wonderful front door options installed in your house (if you don’t already!), like the timeless, classic Baton Rouge iron door. How can you ensure that your front door remains as beautiful as it was when first installed? A door overhang can provide your home with a sleek aesthetic while also providing functional protection to your front door.

Benefits of Having a Door Overhang
The appropriate door overhang for your home can serve a number of purposes, including:

Providing a dry place for visitors to wait for you (like trick-or-treaters who can’t wait for their candy on a rainy Halloween night);
Providing shade from the hot sun (which will serve your late summer ice cream delivery well!);
Preventing rotting in the door jamb (to make sure your family, friends, and pets can quickly come in and out of your home without worrying about the door falling off); and,
Limiting the exposure of the front door to moisture and the elements (so your front door can look just as gorgeous after a brisk spring storm as it did before!)

Choosing the Right Door Overhang For Your Home
There are a number of gorgeous options that are available for you to choose that will compliment the architectural aesthetic of your home, and we at Metro Steel Doors can provide you with guidance on the types of overhangs that best compliment our various doors for the aesthetic that you are trying to achieve. But any door overhang will not provide you with what you are looking for if it is not the right length for your door!

How to Appropriately Calculate Door Overhang “Just Right”
Just like Goldilocks said when tasting the porridge bowls of the three bears, you want the length of your door overhang to be “just right”. Too short, and it will not adequately protect your front door from the weather elements that you experience. Too long, and the aesthetic may end up detracting from the beauty of your front door and external home appearance. Luckily, the calculation for ensuring the appropriate length of door overhang is relatively simple. While we will go into detail as to how to calculate the right length below, you may additionally benefit from a visual that we have published on our website of the formula calculation as well.

In general, the formula to assess the appropriate length of door overhang is dividing the distance from the base of your front door to where the beginning of the overhang would be in half. While this works for most climates, it is no secret that Texas experiences its fair share of severe weather and hot sunshine. Given this, you may want to consider a more generous overhang allowance to protect your front door. In these cases, we would just make the length of the door overhang and the height of the base of the door to the overhang the same amount.

Where Do We Go From Here?
You may be overwhelmed by the amount of options available to you regarding door overhang options for the aesthetic of your home. You could be unsure about whether your door overhang should be half of the length or the full length of your door in order to be protective of the elements. Or maybe you are ready to have a door overhang installed in your home!

At Metro Steel Doors we have prided ourselves on being able to bring your home aesthetic dreams to life since 2006. We know the power and dramatic effect that the right front door and accompanying overhang can have on making your home uniquely yours, and we pride ourselves on our customer service to take your ideas and visions to the next level! If you live in the Houston, Dallas, or Austin, TX area, please call us at (903) 520-7725, email us at tom@metrosteeldoors.com, or contact us on our online contact form today so we can appropriately assist you in finding a door overhang solution that will provide you with beauty and resilience for years to come!