It’s been a few weeks, but that’s because I wanted to do this in one post rather than talking about woodwork all the time which is totally off-topic for a strawbale blog. 😉
So the original plan for the shed was to do normal boring typical roller doors because…it’s a shed. You have roller doors. *shrug* At some point along the way I thought maybe it’d be cool to build barn-style doors myself….and then a couple of days later a timber auction popped up with massive loads of rough-sawn marri and what was I supposed to do?
Now that I’d finally gotten all my woodworking gear out of storage I could get to work on them. First step was to mill all the timber for the outer frames. I’d picked an auction lot that’d allow me to build all four doors out of solid timber, but that be
- Boring
- Heavy
- Actually way too prone to movement, because solid timber is fun like that
Better plan was to build them as frame & panel doors – this would make them lighter, more stable and prettier…but of course also take a lot more time because why do things the simple way? So – milling timber. All the marri was rough-sawn, and….let’s just say it probably wasn’t stacked all that well for drying, so a lot of them were a bit warped. The monster got a workout, and I made a lot of sawdust:
made some frames:
milled all my offcuts down to start making the panels:
This marri turned up some very pretty grain patterns, which I wasn’t expecting – it normally just has gum lines and voids (which are a pain in the butt to work around) but this has some gorgeous spalting and other nice features.
Gluing panels up:
Installing panels in frames:
Glue-up for the rest of one door:
Flipped them over and added cross-bracing on the back side:
Added some pretty brackets to the corners and middle of the outer edge, both because they were pretty and because I figured it could do with the reinforcement:
And then a super fun day of putting them in place, measuring the hinge positions, taking them down, rebating the hinges, rebating the outer edges so they fit together nicely, and rehanging them:
And they look right purdy, if I do say so myself. 🙂 I’ve got a piece for that top gap, I just need to put it in and clean it all up. I’ll also paint the hinges, and the various bolt heads, to match the brackets, and give it all a coat of finish – thankfully these doors are well under-cover, so I don’t expect them to cop much abuse from the weather.
All up this was about 6 days’ work, to do two complete doors and the frames for the other two – I always forget how long actual woodwork takes, compared to the bulk-construction tasks of the rest of the build. For now I’ve boarded up the other doorway, so I can actually lock up the shed, but I’m not going to show you that side because it looks awful compared to these lovely doors!
