Case Provides Unique Door-To-Door Service

When one door closes for Charles Case, he simply opens another.

Twelve years ago when Case gave up truck driving, he went into door and hardware sales, and when he wasn’t making any money at that, he decided to stick his foot in the open doorway of opportunity and leverage his own niche market.

He’s been “starvin’ or feastin’ for 10 years,” he said.

Case, owner of Case Door Co. of Farmington, installs doors for general contractors all over Northwest Arkansas and as far away as Coffeyville, Kan. He currently has a job in the Jayhawk state installing 275 plus doors in a hospital expansion for Nabholz Construction Corp.

If that sounds like too narrow a niche at about $50 per door for a basic interior installation, consider that Case estimates his company grossed about $90,000 in revenue last year.

And Case said a lot of opportunity is knocking.

He’s had as many as eight jobs going at one time and currently has five contracts pending in various phases. He keeps four subcontractors busy when he’s got enough work to keep him from personally installing at every site.

Case said there’s no one busy season in his industry, that it’s all busy, especially right now in Northwest Arkansas.

But door installation is more than hanging a slab of wood from the hinges, Case said. He’s got to worry about fire ratings, building codes and manufacturer specs as well as the weight and condition of the door.

The most challenging installations he does involve fire-rated doors for stairwells, Case said. In the event of a fire, if the doorways don’t seal properly, the stairwell can act as a chimney and feed the flames.

Other challenges are “pair doors,” doors that meet opening-to-opening, and are fire rated, Case said. Those require a coordinator — a piece of hardware that keeps one of the doors from closing all the way until the other is in a closed position — then allows the second door to close.

Case’s company hung every door for the Inn at Carnall Hall restoration project on the University of Arkansas campus, he said.

Richard Alexander, Rob Merry-Ship and Ted and Leslie Belden, along with the UA and the late James and Joyce Lambeth, were the developers of the project.

Case said virtually every door in the interior of the building is original, which presented problems with modern knobs and locks, because the doors are a full one-half inch thinner than a modern door.

Case had to machine most of the doors to make everything fit, he said. The job was so labor intensive, he didn’t make much money in the end.

Case has installed doors at J.C. Penney in the Northwest Arkansas Mall and the Reindl Warehouse, both in Fayetteville, and Fadil Bayyari Elementary School in Springdale, to name a few.

Mike Rohrbach, co-owner of Fayetteville’s Flying Burrito Co., said Case installed all the doors at his company’s two locations.

He said he and partner Archie Schaffer IV tried to hang a couple of interior bathroom doors at the first location but weren’t successful. Rohrbach said that Case fixed the doors and pretty much earned their business.

“He was always on time and did what he said he would,” Rohrbach said.