Doors

Wellington Palace has one of those circular layouts, where you can run laps from the formal living room, out to the front hallway, through the den, down the galley kitchen, back into the formal living room.  There are large openings between the kitchen and the den,  the den and the front hallway, and the living room and the front hallway. Then, for some unknown reason, there is a door between the kitchen and the formal living room. I guess so you can hide the dirty dishes from guests? It even has a lock on it, which makes zero sense, since you can just walk around the den to the other side of the door. Who knows.

Here's what I know. My fluffernugget is old. 

She's going on 17 this year. And old dogs are a lot less likely to be able to wait for you to get home and let them out after you work 14 hours in a day. The living room is carpet, and let's just say we like to keep her out of there. We've been doing this with a baby gate.

While this is a perfectly serviceable solution, it's not terribly pretty. We also had to take it down whenever we had certain wheelchair bound family members over for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and it's really a huge pain to move. So I had the idea for a sliding barn door. There's a great expanse of open space on either side of the entrance into the living room, and... sue me. I think they're cool. 

My wonderful family knew of my ambition and not only did they buy me the sliding door hardware that I had my eye on, but they also snagged two antique french doors for $40 via craigslist. You can see them languishing in my garage gathering dust in my last post. 

Because they bought me both in 2017. And I haven't gotten around to installing them. So when I basically became unemployed due to Covid, I decided Lucas was right. In the immortal words of the Doors, the time to hesitate is through.

First I installed a header over the opening. That way I wouldn't have to futz with getting the rail into the studs. Also, the hardware I bought has holes every 500 millimeters, which is not 16 inches on center, not that my studs are remotely where they're supposed to be to begin with. This just made everything easier. I marked out the studs on the wall and made sure to put two screws into each stud for the header. 

This was the project that made me replace that tiny light in the hall. 

Next I had to prep the doors. I intend to lightly sand them and paint them a nice soft white color. But the second I started sanding large swaths of paint started peeling off - like baseball sized chunks. And I just couldn't stick to my original plan. For two reasons: 1. if I painted over such poorly adhered paint, it was just gonna peel and take the new paint with it. and 2. The wood underneath was too pretty to cover up. So I ended up spending a week stripping the doors. 

I really did not intend to do this. I hate stripping wood. I know I do it a lot for someone who claims to hate it, but sometimes the wood wants what the wood wants. 

As an aside, they have changed the formula for Citristrip. It used to smell almost pleasant and look like a peach smoothie. Now it smells like burning rubber and looks like orange Fanta. It still works, but it is much less pleasant to work with. 

The doors had two other small issues. They were not tall enough. I really needed an 84" door, and these were 80". I solved this by planing a 2x4 to the appropriate thickness on my husband's coworker's planer in return for some homemade cookies, and attaching sections of it to the bottom of each door with 4" screws and lots of glue. That's why the bottoms are painted with a cool racing stripe. I used wood filler to make it look more like one piece of wood. 

The other issue was some fairly serious wood rot in one of the doors. I initially attempted to use regular wood filler to fix this. I knew from the onset that this was unlikely to work. 

There was just far too much rotted out wood for this. I ended up using Bondo wood filler. At some point, Bondo realized that people were using their automotive body filler to repair broken wood furniture, and they reformulated it to be stainable. It's a two part epoxy wood filler that stinks to high heaven, but it's hard as a rock in 15 minutes. You can sand it, you can stain it (though it takes stain differently than wood) and you can even screw into it. I didn't, because I didn't trust it that much. 

To use it, I wrapped a piece of duct tape around the part of the door that was rotted away to mimic where the edges of the door would have been. Then I filled it with the stinky goo. You've got to work quick, it only has about 5 minutes of working time. When it was set up hard I sanded it smooth, and it was actually harder and denser than the pine 2x4 I screwed next to it. Seriously.

I also filled in the holes left after I removed the original door knob hardware. After a painstaking process of sanding and painting, I had two doors of the appropriate size with a nice yellow stripe at the bottom. I actually hung the doors upside down because the bottoms were a nice solid place to screw in my hardware. 

I didn't take pictures of the next part because it was a gigantic pain the rear and I was doing good just to get it done. We hung the rail (which was very long) and made sure it was PERFECTLY LEVEL. It is a very heavy steel rail. This was not fun. At that point we were free to attach the hardware to the doors and hang them.

At this point I turned my attention to the original door knobs. The first rule of restoration is, it probably hasn't been cleaned in 50 years. So I took some barkeeper's friend to the door plates and knobs. 

That my friends is nearly 100 years of hand gunk. Go clean your doorknobs. That was seriously all it took to make these beauties shine again. I used some JB Weld steelstik to attach hanger bolts to the actual knobs. It's a two part epoxy that is kind of like play dough. You knead it until it is all one color and you've got about 5 minutes to stick two things together. I crammed a bit inside the knobs and shoved in the hanger bolt. Then I drilled a pilot hole in the doors where I wanted the knobs to be, slipped the door plates through the hanger bolt, and screwed the knobs on by hand. 

I may decide later that the obvious spot where the filler is covering the hole from the original door knob hardware bothers me, and cover it up somehow. But for now, I'm ok with it. 

These doors look so much better than a baby gate, they're easier to operate, and they don't have to be removed if I want to move furniture in or out, or if someone needs to come in via wheelchair. Now, my formal living room has a door at both entrances, and it offers a tiny bit of privacy when this room doubles as a guest room. And it only took two and a half years to pull it off.