Barn Door, Part 2 - Assembly

I'm sure you've all been waiting with bated breath for the next installment in the barn door series. I know the last post ended on a pretty major cliffhanger. Will Aaron and Kristen get the door put together? Will they accidentally set it on fire and burn down their house? Will Kristen gain the superhuman ability to open twist-off beer bottles? The answers to all these questions and more are ahead, so stick around.


So the first thing we needed to do was lay out the vertical boards and figure out how they'd best fit together. As I mentioned in the last post, we intentionally bought some funky pieces of wood. That's awesome for aesthetics, but not so great for a project that does require a number of straight lines. Basically we spent a good deal of time switching pieces around, turning them over, and rearranging them until we found out the order in which they fit together best. Once we got that figured out, we very lightly penciled in numbers in the top corners. Laying it all out on the ground was the first time it resembled a door, and I have to admit we exchanged some pretty giddy high-fives/paws.




Cece sucked at arranging the boards.



Well I'll be. A door!

Before going ahead all willy-nilly with the drill, we took our time measuring and marking out exactly where all the screws were going to go on the top board. Once again taking cues from housetweaking.com's project, we opted for two screws per vertical board, set diagonally. We figured out how deep the pilot holes needed to be, and marked the drill bit accordingly. To make sure everything fit snugly together, Kristen stood on the top board while I did the drilling.

Now, once all the vertical boards were screwed to the top board, we had basically what looked like a comb, with the long vertical boards being the teeth. They were splaying out in funky directions though, and we needed to squeeze the whole thing together and hold it that way while we attach the kick board. So, after marking the drill holes for the kick board (again, 2 per vertical board, set diagonally) we wedged the side of the door up against the wall, and used an extra 1x4 I had laying around to shove the whole thing together. If we had a much bigger work bench we could have simply clamped the whole thing down, but this was the best we could do given the circumstances. It actually worked out pretty well. I could hold the 1x4 with my knees and drill at the same time. This next photo is while we were still measuring, but you can see the door up against the wall (actually up against another 1x4), and the piece of wood used to brace the whole thing together.

It took me a couple minutes to get up from this position.

Once that was done, we slapped the middle cross piece on based on where we wanted the handle to eventually be, and voila, the door itself was assembled. Break time!



Kristen puts her work gloves to good use.


The next step was to attach the wheel sets and aprons to the top of the door. The paltry instructions that came with the hardware recommended drilling holes straight down into the top of the door to accommodate the rather long carriage bolts that held the wheels to the aprons. For us though, this would have meant drilling holes along the seams where the pieces of wood were joined and this made me really nervous, so we ended up replacing the bolts with much shorter ones. A big thanks to our local Ace Hardware for coming through big time at this point. Apparently the carriage bolts were A) a very odd diameter, and B) a very odd thread. My boy Frank at Home Depot went red in the face when he sheepishly explained to me that they don't carry that type of bolt and I was probably going to have to order it online. I decided to give Ace a try and they found the right bolt in no time. Ace IS the place.

So now we just put the aprons where we wanted them on the door and drilled... and then almost started a fire. I guess it was due to the rather large bit we were using, but each hole drilled put out a ton of smoke and we ended up having to ventilate the house.

Other than the stench of smoke this went swimmingly and we had both aprons attached pretty quickly. That's pretty much it for assembly. At this point all we had left to do was mount the track on the wall and hang the door. I'm going to save that for the next and final post though, because all good things come in threes.