Hang Time

I'll come out and say it; I'm really pleased with our front doors. We had them custom made to my design by Mark 2 Joinery, who were easy to deal with and fabricated them in about 3 days once we had everything confirmed. And event sent us a photo of the finished doors when they were ready for collection.

Doors awaiting collection in Mark 2's workshop

This photo did cause us some concern as the rails don't match and the contrast between them looks quite high. Thankfully they look better under natural light and the differing colours aren't an issue.
You might not think there is much to designing a door, but you'd be wrong. It took us lots of to-ing and fro-ing to get all the questions answered and Mark 2 were happy to help along the way. I originally drew up the basic design in Google Sketchup, but we ended up coming up with a scale drawing one evening in the pub over burgers and beer. I think this is the secret of our success. The burgers ensured we weren't distracted by hunger and the beer helped to keep the mind focused. Or something.

Sketchup model used for the original design

The final design sent to the joiners

The doors were made form Iroko, a tropical hardwood that's suitable for the damp conditions we often find ourselves in here in Britain. Iroko doesn't need regular treatments as the wood contains natural oils which help to stop it from rotting. Plus, the colour looks great.

One door in place. John doing something important with tools.

We had decided to hang to doors ourselves, after all, how hard could it be? I think that every time I've had that thought the answer has always been the same: There is a reason people pay good money to have people with the appropriate skills to do a job that they do not have the skills to do. Fortunately for me my skills (or lack thereof) weren't required as John helped with the installation, and Sophie isn't a bad woodworker herself.

One thing you can always count on is that a seemingly simple job will take you longer than you think. In theory, hanging doors is fairly straightforward. You measure up, drill holes for screws (or bolts in our case), and whack 'em on the hinges. Simple, right? Well almost. One thing we hadn't counted on was the the steelworker had got the door opening slightly the wrong size. Therefore we had to offer the doors up, figure out how much needed to come off and get planing. Sohpie had no trouble with the planer, except maybe the nerves added but the thought of ruining £500 worth of door.

Both doors drilled, planed, and hung at the end of a hot day.

One thing we hadn't accounted for in our design was that we wanted the doors to fold right back against the front bulkhead, a little design flaw on my part. Thankfully the solution to this was to take the corner off the drip detail so Sophie (again with thoughts of ruining the doors at the back of her mind) got sawing.

No doors were harmed during the making of this blog post and we got them hung in an afternoon but the more eagle-eyed among you will have noticed six great big holes waiting to be filled... But it was dinner time and tomorrow's forecast was better than it had been today. Two days in a row without rain, we could barely believe we were still in England and not on a Mediterranean beach somewhere!


We had decided to glaze the doors ourselves, after all how hard can it be? After a trip to Homebase to pick up some sealant we didn't really need (as we had some left over from the windows) but better safe than sorry, we got stuck in. The glass for the doors was ordered from South West Glass along with the glass for the windows. We used 20mm double glazed units to keep us warm and toasty on the inside. Again, SW Glass were easy to deal with and their lead times were about a week, we are satisfied customers.

Glazing was actually fairly straightforward, you "shoot" your sealant around the inner edge, press the glass down into the sealant, and then add more sealant and press your baton into the sealant and pin them in place. It's the clean  up that takes the time. Scraping the excess sealant off the glass/wood with a Stanley knife blade, cleaning the blade, repeat lots of times, and then going around with loo roll making sure all panes are sealant-smear free was pretty time consuming. However, I think it was worth it. When you end up with the finished product it makes those long evening slaving over a beer and burg- I mean, studiously calculating dimensions, all worth it.

The finished doors, fully glazed, corners of the drip detail removed.

The doors were temporarily held in place by some M8 threaded bar cut to length as we couldn't get the right length bolts, but these will be replaced by button headed bolts which we will fill so the hinges have the appearance of being riveted on, and to stop anyone else from simply undoing the bolts. On the rear we have used dome-headed nuts, recessed into the timber which we will leave unplugged as we like the look of them.

Dome headed nuts used to fix the door from the insid.