A worn set of commercial hollow steel double doors at an Ottawa-area school stripped out and replaced — new steel slabs hung, a new electrified panic bar wired to the fire alarm, fresh closers, fire alarm contacts, a pull handle and kick plates fitted and commissioned. Here is the full before-and-after story.
Schools are not forgiving environments for doors. Students push, prop, kick and hit them hundreds of times a day, and decades of Ottawa winters cycling through freeze and thaw do the rest — frames shift, hardware fails, and what was once a secure fire exit becomes a liability. That is exactly what we walked into on this job. Fix My Door Now Ottawa was called in to replace a set of commercial hollow steel double doors at an Ottawa-area school, where the finish had yellowed and chipped, the closers had gone sluggish, the panic bar was stiff and the fire alarm contacts were no longer reliable.
The original installation was a standard commercial hollow steel double set — two full-height panels in a welded steel frame, serving as a fire-rated emergency exit on a high-traffic corridor that connected to an exterior vestibule. By the time we arrived the doors showed their age clearly: heavy surface corrosion along the bottom edges, a panic bar that took more force than it should, closers that had lost their spring tension and let the doors hang open, and fire alarm contacts the facility manager had flagged as intermittently reporting faults. The frames had shifted slightly over the years, the weatherstripping was compressed flat, and the kick plates — meant to take the abuse at the base — had been pushed loose from repeated impact.
This was a full tear-out and reinstall. We removed both door slabs, all existing hardware and the damaged components from the frame, then cleaned the frame, checked it for square and addressed the gaps before hanging the new panels. The new doors are commercial-grade hollow steel — the standard for institutional applications — finished in primer grey and ready for whatever final coat the school board specifies. From there we fitted the full complement of hardware and commissioned it against the building’s life-safety system, the kind of work our commercial door repair service is built around.
In a school, panic hardware is not optional — it is code. The new electrified touchbar ties into the building’s fire alarm system, so when the alarm activates the bar releases electronically and the door pushes open without resistance; an armoured cable runs from the bar to the frame and back to the alarm panel. The original closers had lost their hydraulic tension and were either slamming or not latching at all, so new closers went on both panels, tuned to close fast enough to latch securely but slow enough not to catch anyone walking through. The fire alarm contacts at the top of each leaf — which signal whether the doors are open or closed — were replaced and tested as part of commissioning, and a heavy-duty stainless pull handle and new kick plates finished the active leaf where the daily abuse lands hardest.
Commercial jobs in schools come with constraints that residential work does not. Access windows are tight, a main corridor exit cannot be blocked during school hours, and the panic bar tying into the alarm system means the fire alarm contacts have to be commissioned and tested before the building is handed back. We scheduled around that and coordinated with the facility manager and the fire alarm subcontractor from the start. Because these doors sat in a vestibule between an interior corridor and the exterior, the frame was sealed and the weatherstripping replaced as part of the install so the school was never left with a gap in the building envelope overnight.
This type of project comes to us from school boards, property managers, building superintendents and facilities teams across Ottawa and the surrounding area. Commercial hollow steel doors are the standard in institutional buildings — schools, community centres, government offices, medical clinics — because they are durable, fire-rated and built for constant traffic, and when they fail they usually fail completely. We handle full replacements like this one as well as hardware-only jobs: swapping a failed closer, replacing a damaged panic bar, or reconnecting fire alarm contacts flagged by an inspection. Flat-rate quotes, same-day service where available, no dispatch fees.
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Common questions about this project and the service behind it.