Builders and remodelers who want to provide a stylish and sturdy door while offering a sustainable and green-friendly product are turning to TruStile’s paint-grade MDF doors, available through Truitt and White.

TruStile, a company known for its extensive range of door styles and options, recently introduced Authentic Designs™, a unique system for organizing their many door styles in specific, popular design groups including Arts & Crafts, Colonial, Tuscan, and Tudor. This gives builders, architects and their clients an effective tool for selecting the doors that best fit with the overall design of their individual project.

Additionally TruStile is a single-source provider which allows for even greater design flexibility by giving customers the ability to match a stain grade door with paint grade doors or bi-fold doors with room entry doors.

If your client doesn’t find the exact door they want in TruStile’s extensive product offering, TruStile also offers custom designs for their MDF paint-grade doors. If you can conceptualize a door design, TruStile can produce it. “They pretty much do anything you can draw up,” says Joel Trestrail, outside salesman at Truitt and White. “It’s a pretty cool deal.”

TruStile offers their doors without formaldehyde resins, another important selling angle for builders. “Some people are concerned about the formaldehyde resin that goes into MDF,” says Chuck Tamblyn of TruStile Doors. “Formaldehyde resin is basically in every engineered product—anything that’s an engineered wood product for the home or office,” he adds. Many customers and architects are increasingly insisting on formaldehyde-free products. TruStile recognizes this and offers a formaldehyde-free MDF door, at a 20% upcharge.

In addition to producing a green product, TruStile is committed to a green manufacturing process. By employing computer-aided design to optimize the use of MDF sheets, they saw off parts of a sheet for the styles of the doors and use the rest for manufacturing the rails of the doors. “We make the most out of the MDF we get,” Chuck adds. On another green take, TruStile has an incinerator at their manufacturing facility that burns all the waste from their doors. And, with the heat from the incinerator, heat their facilities during the winter!

Working with MDF
While touted as a green product, MDF has many other attractive options. It has good sound transmission properties, deadening the sounds from room to room, and it takes paint well. “And it looks really good—very clean, sharp lines,” says Chuck. With a much smoother surface and denser material it’s a more flexible material to work with, making it convenient for configuring a wide variety of different door styles.

Fire doors
TruStile offers 20 to 90 minute fire-rated doors for a wide variety of their MDF doors in time increments of 20, 45, 60, and 90-minutes. Though different building codes specify different fire ratings for specific openings, the popular fire door for the residential market is the 20-minute door, primarily for access from garage to house. “The fact that TruStile offers a variety of 20 minute panel doors is huge for our market,” says Joel. “So often, a customer has a house full of one-panel or four-panel doors, and they have to settle for a solid-core flush door to meet fire code,” he adds.

New, online options
TruStile recently upgraded its website that lets architects download CAD drawings of their different door styles and place them directly into blueprints or rendering. “It’s also a wonderful tool that lets builders show customers how the door fits in with the rest of the home,” says Joel. For example, a builder can specify a custom width and height needed for a chosen door, use the design tool on the website and then show it to the customer. Visit www.trustile.com and check out the range of information and sales support the site offers.

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