Flintshire's Forge: Barn Doors!

I apologize for not getting these up sooner but the Barn Doors have indeed been built and installed! I was able track down some rough sawn yellow pine from a local sawmill (http://www.fergusoncustomsawmill.com/) and built the doors one Saturday with some help from brother David. We decided to go with yellow pine as our like/kind door building material because the existing siding on the Blacksmith Shed is yellow pine and so, being that we had no evidence to persuade us otherwise, we went with that as acceptable logic.

I would highly recommend to anyone that is interested in rough sawn material or any other cool rough millwork projects to look up the guys over at Ferguson - Kyle runs a nice operation over there.

I am going to post the barn door project in several parts because there are so many pictures. This first post deals with the construction of the actual doors.

In the beginning, there was a drawing... We didn't have any archival evidence of what the original doors looked like so I looked to other barns on the farm for design ideas. Most barn doors just have the classic z-bracing. We really wanted to let as much light into the run-in area as possible so I incorporated some salvaged windows into the design and this is what we came up with.

Here, the rough sawn material is at the shop ready for millwork and assembly. Again, big thanks to the guys at Ferguson Custom Sawmill.

Here, I have ship-lapped all the boards that will become the verticals on the doors. This will help conceal gaps as the boards dry and shrink.

Door boards all cut to length.

Had a tough time on this decision. I really wanted to use clench nails but ended up using these exterior lags. The kicker was that these were readily accessible and I thought that they might be faster than my other options (I was trying to get the doors built in one Saturday). I'll have no worries about guests confusing the period of construction on the doors anyhow. I painted them black for a more finished appearance.