Maximum 1/8 in. clearance at head and jambs. Annual inspection, documented in writing.
ADA 404.2.8.1
A closer must take at least 5 seconds to move a door from 90° to 12° from the latch.
ADA 404.2.9
Interior hinged doors: 5 lbf maximum opening force. Fire doors excepted.
IBC egress
30 lbf to set a door in motion, 15 lbf to swing it fully open.
Most buildings cannot say how many openings they have
Ask a property manager how many doors are in their building and you usually get a pause, then a guess, then a number that is low by about a third.
That is not carelessness. Openings are invisible until one of them stops working. Nobody budgets for a door. Nobody walks a building counting them. So the exit device on a stair door goes eleven years without anyone touching it, the coiling door at the loading dock gets chained open because it binds, and the rated pair between the corridor and the kitchen has a wedge under it that has been there long enough to leave a mark on the tile.
Then somebody schedules an inspection and all of it surfaces at once.
Charlotte Commercial Doors works the other direction. The first visit is a survey: every opening walked, numbered, photographed, and written down with its condition and its rating if it carries one. What comes back is a register, not a quote. The register says what has to be corrected now, what can wait for a budget cycle, and what is fine and should be left alone.
What comes back from a survey is a register, not a quote. Each opening carries a number, a rating, a measurement and a rank, so the first cheque you write buys the finding that matters.
What we do
Five lines of work
Five lines of work, chosen to cover an opening across its whole life rather than to catch every possible call. New and replacement doors and frames. Fire-rated assemblies and their annual inspection. Access control and electrified hardware. Coiling and sectional doors at the dock. And the hardware itself, which is where most failures actually live. Each page walks the failure patterns, the code that governs them, and what genuinely moves a price.
Started by somebody who used to fail these inspections
Wendell Pharr spent fourteen years in facilities for a regional school district, and for nine of those the fire door program was his to answer for. He was the person standing next to the inspector. He was also the person who worked out, one building at a time, that the district had no idea how many rated openings it owned, and that contractor invoices going back a decade described work on doors nobody could locate.
The survey that fixed it took four months and produced a spreadsheet with just over nine hundred rows.
What it made obvious was that the expensive part had never been the repairs. It was the not knowing. Openings corrected twice because nobody recorded the first time. Doors replaced whole when the frame was the problem. Rated assemblies quietly voided by a maintenance tech drilling for a new lockset with the best intentions in the world.
He left in 2019 and started taking this work under his own name. The rule has not moved since: the record comes first, the repair comes second, and without a record the repair is only a rumor.
Survey, then schedule, then repair. The register is yours whether or not we do the corrections.
Why this outfit
Why buildings keep us on the vendor list
The survey is the deliverable
Openings get numbered, photographed, and recorded with condition and rating. You keep the register whether or not you hire us for the corrections, and it is yours to hand to the next contractor if you would rather.
Ratings are treated as ratings
Nothing goes on a fire door assembly that is not listed for it. If a proposed repair would void a listing you get told, and you get told why in language that survives an inspector's follow-up question.
Frames get measured before doors get quoted
A door that binds is usually reporting a frame that moved.
Deficiencies are ranked, not dumped
A finding sheet with sixty items and no order is useless to somebody with a budget. Corrections come back sorted by life-safety exposure first and cosmetic last, so the first check you write buys the thing that matters.
Work outside the lane is named up front
Automatic pedestrian operators, glass replacement, and dock levellers get referred out. The referral costs us the invoice and saves you a technician learning on your building.
Storefront entries take the heaviest cycle count of anything in a building, and they report it through the hardware first.
Coverage
Where the vans go
The metro reaches across a state line and four counties, and the building stock changes character as you move through it. Uptown towers run stair doors and elevator lobby pairs, usually already under a facilities contract. South End is warehouse conversions where the original coiling doors are still hanging and the tenant improvement drawings pretend they are not. The corridors out toward Concord and Indian Trail are newer retail, mostly aluminum storefront on builder-grade closers that arrived out of adjustment and stayed that way.
Beyond the city line we work Concord, Huntersville, Indian Trail, Fort Mill, Matthews, and Harrisburg. Give the coordinator a precise address and a suite number. Travel across this metro is not symmetrical, and the scheduling window depends on which side of I-77 the crew is already working.
Coverage across four counties and a state line. Positions are schematic — scheduling follows where the vans already are that day, not a radius on a map.
How often does a fire door assembly have to be inspected?
Annually under NFPA 80, and the inspection has to be documented in writing and kept available. The written record is the part that gets buildings cited, more often than the doors themselves.
What actually fails an inspection most often?
Clearances and labels. NFPA 80 caps the gap at the head and jambs at 1/8 inch, the meeting edges of a pair at that same 1/8 inch with a 1/16 inch tolerance, and the undercut at 3/4 inch where there is no threshold. Floors get recarpeted, the undercut changes, and nobody re-measures. After that it is painted-over labels, doors that will not latch from a full open position, and hardware that is not listed for a rated assembly.
Do you do the inspection and the repairs?
Yes, and that is a conflict worth watching in any vendor. The finding sheet is written so somebody else could price from it, and we will hand it over if you want a second number.
Can a door be trimmed to fit?
Undercutting to the limit on the label is usually permitted. Trimming the top or the width generally is not, and a hole cut through a steel fire door cannot be filled with body filler. The label governs, not the general rule, and the label is on the hinge edge.
My door closes too fast for the people using it. Is that a code issue?
It can be. ADA 2010 Standards section 404.2.8.1 requires a closer to take at least five seconds to bring the door from 90 degrees to 12 degrees from the latch. Most doors that fail it fail on adjustment rather than on the closer.
Do you charge for the survey?
Yes. It is real labor and it produces a document you keep.
What do you need before scheduling?
Address with suite, a contact who can get us into locked areas, whether there is a landlord or property management approval step, and any certificate of insurance or vendor onboarding requirement. That last one delays more jobs than anything technical.
