Double-door-a-palooza! This weekend found three new doors at Dan's house and one at Erin's… a four-door-weekend.
We replaced Dan's front door not long ago and this weekend, we hatched a plan for a pair of closet doors and — just for fun — a garage door.
Dan has been doing quite a lot of work on his Eichler, including turning a "utility" room into livable space. With the help of Glen Wagner at Anderson Heating and a few other folks, he replaced his boiler and enclosed it in a closet and relocated his laundry and hot-water heater to the garage. This opened up a large (78in) space for a closet in this newly re-envisioned room. Added to the fact that the original coat closet was absorbed by the adjoining master-bedroom closet in another part of the renovation, it made a lot of sense to have some storage space here. Dan framed it out, put up the sheetrock and I showed up to a blank canvas Saturday afternoon.
However, within a few hours, it became apparent — like it often does with these sorts of projects — that in order to frame out the closet properly, we really needed to replace the adjoining door to the garage at the same time… a project that was a bit further down the to-do list. A run to Home Depot and a few hours later, we had the door in place and were ready to proceed with the closets.
We started by framing the adjoining door; determining the edges of the closet; and installing the steel sliding door track and overhead fascia/skirting to hide the track — very similar to how it was done originally. The new doors tip into place at an angle, so it was important to get the spacing just right — close enough to hide the track, far enough out so that the doors can tip in. This is a bit different from the originals that lifted into place vertically and ran on wooden tracks.
When we made our own doors, it was very difficult to rebate/rabbet the edges for the inset grasscloth panels —not to mention that the real wood twisted a bit. Dan has used MDF moulding on much of his house and Friday night, I got an idea to create some quick Eichler-style closet doors using the same warp-free moulding (joined with biscuits and glue) and facing the back of the doors with a smooth piece of plywood for overall structural strength (inset an inch on the sides for a smoother look) — much simpler than the inset panel and by face-gluing and stapling the plywood to the otherwise wobbly MDF frame, everything tightened up nicely. Since most of Dan's house is white, the smooth panels will look good simply painted — and we were able to make a pair of original looking doors in just a few hours… and they're dead flat and hang straight.
