We built a custom sized wood barn door to separate our bedroom and bathroom.
Today we are sharing a project that made a huge difference in the look and feel of our master bedroom. We took off the chunky double doors with the hideous gold doorknobs to the master bathroom and replaced it with a large, custom made wood barn door. We bought a set of old/worn/heavy barn door rollers from eBay that came from an actual barn door and from there started to build our wood barn door.
Here is what the wall and door in our master bedroom looked liked when we moved in. The whole house had those gold door knobs. They were the first thing to go.
This project didn’t come without it’s challenges. A large problem we encountered right off the bat was we lost one of the metal rollers. We took one with us to as inspiration and a guide as we were shopping for the various supplies we needed for the wood barn door and wouldn’t you know we got home and realized that we only had one roller. Panic may or may not have set in.
Yes, in our eagerness and excitement to start the project, we left the roller in the shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot. So we had to drive all the way back to the home improvement store. We drove all around the parking lot looking for our abandoned cart that had this priceless (to us) yet probably unrecognizable (to whomever may have found it) hunk of metal in the front of a cart in the cart return. We couldn’t find our (or any cart) in the parking lot. Dang shopping cart wranglers doing their job.
We finally went inside to the customer service desk as a last resort and tried to describe the item we had lost. Thank goodness a nice shopper dropped off our roller and it was returned to our possession. If not that could have been the end of our wood barn door project.
Our wood door before it was a door was just wood.
In just a little over a week, Brent came up with a plan for the construction and we built a functional wood barn door complete with a metal track and rollers. Doing it ourselves saved us a lot of money and allowed us to customize the look to exactly what we wanted for our master bedroom.
FREE PLANS
If you are interested in building your own barn door, get our FREE barn door plans.
How We Built Our Wood Barn Door
1. Brent began by cutting the boards to length to frame the door.
2. Once all the boards were cut, we laid them out to make sure they all fit together.
3. Brent used the Joint Genie to drill holes for dowel rods to make a stronger glued joint.
4. Then he joined the boards with glue and dowel rods.
5. Next, we clamped the boards. we used wooden blocks to keep the clamps from scarring the surface of the door.
6. With all the slats situated in their groves, the door could be glued and clamped together.
7. After a day of drying, the door was ready to be stained. We chose Minwax Ebony so it would match our bedroom furniture. Although oil based stain can be annoying and messy, we found they are better at achieving a dark stain on pine.
8. The door was stained and had to sit and dry for a couple days.
9. For the rail we used a piece of aluminum and cut wooden blocks spacers to extend the rail away from the wall. The tab at the bottom of the spacer is to add extra support as the door pulls down on the rail. If not for the tab, the block would eventually dig in to the dry wall.
10. Although it was tempting to use spare bolts and screws to attach the rollers, we made a special trip to the hardware store and picked up the appropriate sized screws and bolts so everything was uniform.
So there you have it, our fully functional wood barn door made from scratch. We love how the large door fills up the wall in our master bedroom and pops against our new wall color (Functional Gray from Sherwin-Williams).
Don’t forget you can get FREE plans to build your own custom wood barn door and check out our DIY tutorial for installing a barn door!
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