Tuesday, July 15, 2008

The Birth of a Door

Today I finally finished the last step in a fairly extended project. (Not, you understand, that the project has taken so long, but rather I put off doing the last bit for a really embarrassingly long time...)

Anyway, it all started two years ago, when we ripped the roof off our house and built a second story. When we put the stairs up to the new second story, it wasn't practical to put a full-size closet underneath. Rather than give up the space under the stairs, however, I opted to leave the space accessible, with openings for half-height doors on both sides, and an even smaller space under the stairs themselves, accessible from the bedroom. Small is relative of course- we can fit four guitar cases in that space.

Anyway, rather than add custom doors to an already expensive project, I decided to build them myself. I even had a plan- there were several hollow core doors that had been removed during construction and weren't needed (the new doors going in were prehung pine-panel doors).

So, I started with a bare opening. Photobucket

The contractor had installed baseboard across the bottom of the opening, and there was also framing down there. So my first task was to install a few spacers and then put in a sill, that would stick up a bit over the baseboard. The baseboard is pine, so just leaving it hanging in space would be asking for it to get broken. So I rounded over the corners on a length of pine board with the router, and installed the sill:
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I also covered bare bits of the stair with a scrap of luan plywood (leftover from the backs of bookcases) and a bit of trim, and painted the inside of the closet. Why? I have no idea. I just felt compelled to do it. Apparently I felt compelled to paint my knees and elbows as well- the space was a tad too deep to paint from the outside- and kind of a tight fit for a painter to crawl into and paint from the inside. But I persevered.
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Next step was to figure out the size of the door. Of course the opening wasn't square, so I left a little clearance plus space for the frame and arrived at an estimated size. Then I took a chunk of hollow-core door (left from the other door- I had two spares, but why cut up a door if you don't have to?) and cut it down to finished size.
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Of course now you can see that the door isn't solid. (Have you ever wondered what was inside a door? I can now tell you that they have spacers made of chipboard or something similar.)
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In order to give the door a solid edge all around, I cut pieces of scrap wood to exact size and fitted and glued them all along the unsupported edges.
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This was done in stages- mainly because I didn't have enough clamps to do two sides at once- but this is a good place to break. Next post, building the doorframe, mortising hinges, and prehanging the door.

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