Reinforcing what is there, or replacing the lot
An overlay reinforcement keeps your door and dresses it: a folded steel sheet over the leaf, angle sections on the frame, a multipoint lock, anti-lift pins. In the old rental blocks of central Oullins it is often the only workable route, because the flat doors there are non-standard sizes and a stock armoured set will not fit the opening without cutting into the masonry.
A complete armoured door set is a single unit — leaf, frame, lock, hinges — designed and tested as a whole, then fitted in place of what was there. Its strength no longer depends on the original joinery, but it depends entirely on the fixings. In the flats at Les Hautes-Roches it is how the anchors hold in the concrete wall that decides the outcome, not the product sheet.
So the substrate settles the question. A frame rotted by decades of damp off the Yzeron valley floor, a hollow dry lining, a jamb already patched after a break-in: in all three cases what gets screwed on will not do what is expected of it. The survey comes before any proposal, and it starts by probing the jamb on the keep side.
What the building and the street impose
In a block of flats the entrance door is both private property and part of the communal appearance. In the old stairwells of central Oullins, where the doors match one another from floor to floor, the building rules may set a colour or a finish. Read them, and go through the managing agent before ordering a leaf that will be seen from the common stairs.
If the door opens straight onto the street — a shop unit on the Grande Rue, a town house, a converted workshop in La Saulaie — changing its external appearance may need planning consent. The commune planning department will tell you what applies to your frontage. It is a step to take before the work, not once the steel is on the leaf.
Finally, the original metal doors of the former industrial premises in La Saulaie fall outside the standard catalogue: unusual widths, welded frames, sometimes a pair of leaves of different sizes. Reinforcement there is worked out piece by piece, after measuring. What was fitted three streets away in an ordinary residential block does not simply transfer.
How does this service work?
Techniques, typical situations, standards and things to watch out for: it is all on our door reinforcement page. This page focuses on what the service involves in Oullins-Pierre-Bénite.