"I'm going to make a door." "You can do that?" "Yes. I can." (sound of chainsaw starting)

[catsittingstill]

Minus the chainsaw.

Okay, I realize things have been kind of quiet over here lately.  So here's a brief update.

You may recall we bought our first house in February.  And it had a one car carport, and, on the other side of the "rumpus room" a one car garage.  Kip generously offered me the garage to do with as I pleased, and I jumped on it.  At the time I used it to store my canoe, and the remains of the canoe making gear, and all my tools.

After a while I decided my tools (and especially the sandpaper and varnish) were tired of living on the floor, and I made some shelves (rapsody on the strength and simplicity of the humble carriage bolt to be written later.)  Then the Jefferson Rural Clinic, where I've been volunteering, needed a cabinet fixed, and I fixed it.  Then they needed some sturdy shelves, so I made some.

Then a friend asked me to build her a canoe.  She offered to pay me to do it.  I think I mentioned that I have boat fever after the August canoe camping trip, so this tied in with my druthers quite neatly.

So I'm in the process of turning the garage into a workshop.  A one car garage, is, to my mind, quite a large workshop--but if you put a canoe in it, it gets smaller very quickly.  I would like to take advantage of my height to store lumber and wood strips (canoe-building requires wood strips 1/4 inch wide and at least a foot longer than the canoe) overhead and out of the way, but the damn garage door and garage door opener basically make a whole stretch of the ceiling off limits.  Not to mention I keep walking into the safety disengage handle (it dangles on a string--walking into it is not painful, except that I tend to wrench my neck when I see something coming at my face unexpectedly)

So I decided to remove the garage door and replace it with two doors that swing outward, like french doors. 

Now you would think that I could not possibly be the only person in the world who would want to do a thing like this.  You would think that there would be people out there, who want that overhead space, or who like old-fashioned buildings, who would want doors seven feet high and four and a half feet wide, and that therefor the glorious free market would have arranged for some company to fill that need.

You would be mistaken.

You can search for "garage double doors" and "carriage house doors" and "garage french doors" untill you are blue in the face, and you'll get dozens of hits but they are all cheats.  They aren't real double doors or french doors or carriage house doors--they're just standard overhead garage doors faked up to look like those other things when they're down.

I hate fakes. 

So, I decided to make them myself.  The standard interior door is just a torsion box--a lightweight frame that holds two "skins" of veneer about an inch apart.  Since for the door to bend, one of the veneer skins would have to stretch, and veneer doesn't stretch much,  the door is rigid, but light.  I figured I could do something similar with 1 x 1 1/2 inch (true--not lumber measure) boards and 1/4 inch plywood.

I bought 2 x 4s from the local lumberyard and paid extra to have them sawed into 1 inch boards.  (it was a lot of ripping; it was quite reasonable to charge extra and I have no complaints)  I measured the space, cut the outside boards, screwed them together (exterior screws--two per junction) and put them in the space to make sure they fit.  They were just a *smidge* big (they fit but there was no gap, and how will we get the hinges in, and be able to open and close them, if they're jammed in tight?) but I fixed that with a sander.  I also cut the interior braces a *smidge* short, which drew the sides in a little.  I put the skin on with shorter screws, one ever four inches along every brace and edge.

I have been at it for two long days and I have the plywood skin on one side of one door.  Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to finish skinning the doors.  Tomorrow the contractor comes who is going to do all the other things to make the garage into a shop: more lights--many more lights!, vertical 2 x 4s bolted into the masonry so I can put shelves and cabinets wherever I care to drill holes,  2 x 4 along ceiling (bolted into joist above ceiling) so I can hang brackets from it to hold strips, some extra plug-ins (not many; can't afford a new / heavier circuit--just have to live with not having very many things plugged in at once, but I could sure use an extra plug-in or two for task lighting) and mostly hanging those new doors.

And the doors aren't ready!  Argh!.

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

I think I'm glad to hear the fact that it's minus the chainsaw. Good luck on your doors!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I'm glad it's minus the chainsaw: chainsaws scare me and the idea of sawing a hole in my house scares me even more. :-)

[mrpsyklops.livejournal.com]

Good luck!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) Thank you.

[mdlbear]

Fun!!

Closest I've come to that so far is our CD cabinet, which started out holding LPs and so is 13" deep. The cabinet has one set of shelves on the back, and the other set on the door. A door full of CDs is *heavy*, which made it interesting.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I have vague plans for some tool cabinets like that. And the nice thing about the vertical 2 x 4s is that I would be able to bolt them firmly to the wall. But you're right about the structural complications of a heavy door.

[mdlbear]

Next time you're in the Bay Area we'll have to get together and geek about woodworking. Meanwhile you might be interested in gmcdavid's LJ.

Advice unasked

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Heee. At the risk of giving annoying unwanted advice:

1. The place to look for building parts is Sweets Catalog--Google's indexes are full of building product spam, and it's hard to find the right keywords. Usually local libraries have a copy of Sweets (it's huge), but part of it is online at McGraw-Hill. (You may have to register.)
2. The usual industrial solution to your ceiling space problem is a roll-up or fold-up door. (The fold-up versions can include windows.)
3. The Usual Suspects (Jeld-Wen, Pella, etc.) as well as numerous smaller firms make leaf doors to order in wood, metal, and fiberglass.

In any event, have fun with your project!

Re: Advice unasked

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Trust an architect to know these things. Obviously I should have come to you last week :-)

A roll up door sounds... interesting. A fold-up door sounds like it might be what my "Setting Up Shop" book calls a "bifold door"--a door with one set of hinges in the standard place and one in the middle so it folds in half. I used to have a closet with doors like that. However they never felt sturdy.

I am having fun with my project, but I would have been happy to solve it more quickly with a commercial product if I could only have found one (for not too much money).

[pstratt.livejournal.com]

One of the things we did when building gates was put a cable that can be tightened from the upper corner of the door by the hinge down to the oposite corner on the bottom. This transfers some of the wait from the furthest point back to the hinges and allows you to keep the door square if it sags as it gets older.

Since these doors are 4+ feet wide there is a fair chance they can sag from the weight.

Paul

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I did contemplate an internal cable running through the structure of the door, but the contractor I talked to was of the opinion that two sheets of 1/4 inch plywood (one on each side of the frame) meant that the door was unlikely to sag.

[bardling.livejournal.com]

Good luck winishing the project, but yay for having a workshop! :)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Yes. :-)

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

Anybody wanna bet, if the contractor arrives while the innards of one of the doors are still visible, that he offers Cat some subcontracting work?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) He may approve of my construction standards but I bet he doesn't want to pay for the labor involved. I have spent 20 hours on the doors so far.

[occams_pyramid]

Add (if the joist is strong enough) a couple of really well seated hooks or eyes in the ceiling, plus points on the wall to fix ropes, all strong enough to hold the weight of a completed canoe. Then you can get to the bottom at any angle, hoist it to a convenient height for any job, and have it out of the way temporarily if something else takes priority.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

The completed canoe, no problem; they're only about 30-50 lbs. The canoe in progress--a canoe is constructed on a form that is very heavy--like, 200 lbs wouldn't surprise me. Hanging *that* from the ceiling is probably a no-go.

Pity. It's a good idea.

[occams_pyramid]

Ah I see - the one I built didn't have anything like that form, and was built in the school workshop where it could be and had to be hauled up out of the way when I wasn't working on it.

[mdlbear]

Let's see: four ropes would put a load of only 25 lbs on each eyebolt -- no problem. At one point we had a papasan chair in our living room suspended from a pair of 1/4" eyebolts screwed into a 4x12 beam. No problem.

[andpuff.livejournal.com]

I hope you're planning to post pictures when you're done -- I, at least, would love to see how your doors came out.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Okay, I will :-)

[aunty_marion]

Sounds utterly brilliant. Older garages used to have ordinary doors (at least in the UK), but I think they got replaced by the up-and-over ones because it meant only one door to open, and it didn't take up space on the drive, also if there wasn't much space to get between the garage and the house (if it was set back a bit, for instance) a standard sideways-opening door might block that space, where an up-and-over one wouldn't. (We tend to be very short on space in the UK!) Also, of course, the up-and-overs could be electronically operated, which was 'Cool'. I don't actually like them much myself, and I think you're quite right to be replacing yours. However, I bow in awe at your carpentry skills! Mine extend to putting up shelving. Sometimes.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Well, this is a bit like making shelves--at least the way I make shelves.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Hurray for chapter one of Constructor Cat and the Gigantic Doors of Doom!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-) Hopefully not doom!

Would barn door's work for what you need?

[adamek.livejournal.com]

http://www.barndoorhardware.com

Re: Would barn door's work for what you need?

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I did check into barn doors, but found that most of them are hung from tracks that run above the lintel and parallel to it. This is great when the barn door is in a big stretch of wall but won't work for my garage--the door is about 80% of the front wall.

But thanks, I appreciate the link.