Why Are Your Hinged Door Headers Lower?

Why are your hinged door headers so often lower than every other header? Hinged doors are usually the limiting height factor at exactly 120" (or less! One very popular one is 119.5") and a 2" sill is below finished flooring so the top of the door will be at 118" from top of finished floor.

This is your critical height limiting factor unless you put a transom on top of the door to achieve your needed height - especially when going to 11' and 12' ceilings now.

And always remember every single time that the door is going to be pushed down from 1-1/2" to 2" depending on the threshold height so it is below finished floor.

Here's a fun math trivia nobody thinks about - how tall are your INTERIOR doors? Even if you have 8' interior doors they are a 96" slab plus a 3/4" top frame plus 1/8" reveal and 3/8" undercut putting the top of the frame at 97-1/4" AFF. Your 96" exterior door NET FRAME SIZE at 1-3/4" below finished floor puts the top of that frame 94-1/4" AFF. That is a THREE INCH DIFFERENCE! If you are casing them that looks awful, nothing lines up.

Very few hinged doors are available over 10' tall and some of them do not have a lever handle option, only door pulls. That may work for an entry door but not your other daily use doors. And many of them are commercial with exposed screws and poor weather seals.

Apparently I could go on endlessly about hinged doors, who would have thought there was so much complexity to them?