Should You Install a Hollow Core Door in Your Home?

• When you need to save money

• When you are installing a large number of doors

• When privacy is more of an issue than blocking sound

• When you are hanging the door by yourself

What Are Hollow Core Doors?

Hollow core doors are fiberboard or laminated wood doors that are much like long, flat boxes that are mostly hollow inside. At key points within the door are cardboard honeycomb spacers that help the door maintain its structure. The edges are made of MDF or softwood such as pine. Hollow core doors are in stock at most home centers.

Hollow Core Door Pros and Cons

Pros

• Hollow core doors are lightweight, making them easy to transport

• Due to their light weight, hollow core doors are easy to install by one person.

• These doors fulfill the basic function of giving a room privacy.

• Most significantly, hollow core doors are inexpensive, with some costing less than $80. This is why most budget-conscious contractors and home builders will steer consumers toward hollow-core doors. This is one area where you can shave costs without completely eliminating a feature. Given that interior doors tend to be installed in great quantities (as opposed to the one or two doors for the exterior), saving costs can be important.

Cons

• Hollow core doors tend to transmit sound. For better soundproofing, use solid core doors inside your house.

• Surfaces of veneered hollow-core doors are only about 1/8-inch thick. This thin veneer does not allow for much more than a light sanding if even that. But even that is a best-case scenario. Many hollow core doors are all fiberboard, no veneer, which means that they can only be re-painted and never sanded. The prime advantage of solid-core wood doors is that they are 100-percent wood and can be sanded, planed, filled, and painted if they become damaged.

• Hollow core doors provide, at best, only moderate resale value, since they have become so ubiquitous. At worst, they can drag down the value of a house if that house has custom features that surpass the quality of hollow core doors. Or to put it more bluntly, hollow core doors are cheap and not necessarily in the good, monetary way. 

Should You Install a Hollow Core Door?

When you switch from hollow core to solid wood doors, you will be alarmed at how well solid wood slows the transmission of sound from room to room. Solid wood simply feels better. In addition, due to the weight, the solid door has a nice, swing to it. 

One compromise may be solid core doors, which have a heavy, solid fiberboard interior and a wood veneer exterior. Solid core doors are just as good at slowing sound transmission as solid wood doors but for less cost.

But reality and money both dictate that hollow core doors have legitimate usages in the modern home. One aspect of this reality is that, if you are replacing all interior doors, you have a lot of replacing to do. To replace every door with a solid wood or even a solid core door might cost far more than you are willing to spend. Even in a small house, you may have as many as eight to ten interior doors. Using hollow core doors can save you hundreds of dollars and vast amounts of time, as opposed to installing solid wood doors. 

Because hollow core doors are so light, they are easy to install, even for one person. They are simple to move into the house, and then from room to room. Once inside the room, their light weight aids in hanging the door on the hinges. You can hold the door with one hand while screwing the door into place with the other hand.