About the Society
The Earnest Door Appreciation Society is a small community of people who care, perhaps unreasonably, about literal back doors. We catalog them. We restore them. We write guides on caring for them. We maintain a Collection currently numbering 18 entries, with new additions added quarterly.
What counts as a back door
For the Society's purposes, a back door is any door that serves as a secondary, service, or rear entrance to a residential or commercial building. This includes:
- Architectural rear entrances — the literal back door of a house.
- Service doors — fire doors, vestibule doors, building-service entrances.
- Patio doors — sliding, French, jalousie, screen, storm, all variations.
- Outbuilding doors — barn doors, garden gates, shed doors.
- Interior connecting doors when they pass between exterior and interior spaces — pocket doors leading to a back porch, for example.
Front doors are out of scope. They have their own enthusiast communities and they do not need our help.
Why we publish guides
The Society's view is that a door is best appreciated by being used and maintained, not by being put behind glass. Our guide pages exist because most home-improvement content on the internet is written by people who have never personally hung a door. The result is generic content that gets people through the install but leaves them with a door that sags in three years.
Our guides are written by people who have actually done the work — who know to square the rough opening first, to use bronze mesh not fiberglass, to track down the manufacturer's roller part number rather than buying the universal kit.
We do not run affiliate links. We do not have sponsorships. The guides exist because they ought to exist.
The Collection
The Society's Collection is 18 doors, ranging from a 1769 Spanish colonial portal to a 2024 commissioned Douglas-fir screen door. Acquisition criteria are loose; the standing requirement is that the door has something to teach. A 1953 Levittown aluminum storm door is in the Collection alongside a Greene & Greene Craftsman because both teach something about their respective moments.
We do not pay for doors. They come to us through salvage networks, estate sales, and donations from owners who recognized that the door deserved a second life.
Joining the Society
The Society does not have a membership roll, dues, or a newsletter. Membership is a matter of attention: if you have stopped on your way out to the yard and really looked at the door you were about to walk through, you are already a member. We recommend starting with the Door of the Day.
A note on the URL
We are aware that "backdoorfreaks" reads as something else at first glance. The Society does not apologize for the domain name; we simply ignore the misreading. Our work is doors. Visitors who arrive expecting other content typically leave within seconds. Visitors who stay tend to learn something useful about hinges.