Installing a Barn Door on a Master Bathroom

A few years ago at Stahl, my first

barn

door

for a client who wanted one on his

bathroom

door

in his

master

bedroom, that video turned out to be one of my most viewed videos to date. I ran into a couple of unique challenges in that case. The most significant thing was that the door would want to open about a foot when the air conditioning was running at full power. What we ultimately concluded was that the door was very lightweight because it was a hollow core door and the wheels on the hardware were incredibly smooth. so just a small draft of air conditioning in the

bathroom

was enough to make the door open a little, we finally solved it by

installing

magnets that kept the door in the fully closed position and also in the fully open position as they really were Anyway, the only two positions you want the door to be in in this video we're going to go over that installation process again in another bathroom in another

master

bedroom for a new client who is actually the son of the people I did the another

barn

door.

A few years ago I have been

installing

using the same basic methods and materials that I used the first time, but this time I don't think the magnets will be necessary. It looks like the wheels on the new hardware this time have a little more stiffness to them, which looks like it will keep the door in place pretty much wherever it lands along the track. This is a fairly inexpensive way to make a barn door. I bought the hardware online for about $100 and the hollow core door I'm using is about $50, the other materials in this install are maybe worth another $25 or so unless you're planning on making your own barn door hardware. .

I'm not sure I can do much better with the materials than the 175 I'm spending. so let's continue with this process. This tent is a standard 80 inch tall hollow core door, which is about as inexpensive a door as you can buy at one of the home improvement stores. It is 36 inches wide, which is perfect for the size of my barn door. in this setup, but the 80 inch height doesn't work, in fact it really needs to be about 84 inches tall. Now you could buy an 84 inch long door and it would be a hollow core door at a price of about 5 to 10 times what this door would cost, which is $50, so if it's important to you to have the look of the race panels that extend up to 84 inches long, then you could spend the extra money, but if you want to do this in a less expensive way and then do what I do here, which is cut and mill 2 inch pieces and join them together to the top and bottom of this door 8 inches.

You may notice that I am using standard 2 by 4 inches. material for these accumulated pieces, the reason is that the door is finally being painted and the 2 material above is a good structural component to add to the door, there is no use in doing something unusual just to add some length to the doors that are being they are going to paint Anyway, after sanding the exposed surface, imagine just a slight bevel cut with the router to match the factory trim that comes on the door. You also see a slot on the bottom of one of the pieces that goes on the bottom of the door. of the barn door hardware is a guide for the bottom of the door that will be installed on the floor, the slot will fit over the guide and keep the bottom of the door in a parallel position to the wall while the door is open and closed along the track there are many options for attaching our two inch reinforcement pieces to the ends of the door.

I'm using a specialized tool called a Domino cutter that makes a cut that allows you to slide these manufactured pieces of wood into that look. a bit like dominoes and are sort of a cross between a tenon for a mortise and tenon joint and a tool for building doors and gates, but it's hard to justify the cost of something like this unless you have a manufacturing business or purpose-built production I make sometimes works like a cookie joiner, but creates stronger joints. I'm using it here because it's easy to get really precise alignment between the assembled pieces and the door, and the joints are incredibly strong, but you could use dowels or even wood screws and glue to hold the pieces together and it would work just fine.

This case will not import my header. The center of the header piece, which measures 85 inches long. I'm going to mount the center directly on this one. Place these on the door jamb, the door is 36 inches wide at our opening with the trim, it is 36 inches wide, so the door when closed will cover the trim around one of the things over the doors barn in the bathrooms. that are in public areas is that it can become a problem because you can still see a little bit from the sides, so in the case of a master bedroom and in this situation, particularly in this house, this is just not a great deal, so I'm a good stud and mount this header board with a little bit of silicone behind it on the sheetrock to the studs and mount it in place and then I'll deal with lining up my door height, setting it up and installing the mira rail how the process goes.

Once I started attaching the headboard, I noticed that the top piece of molding on the door jamb is a little out of level; It's actually about twice the space I'm leaving here, but I decided to just split the difference in half so the header board is a little bit out of level. Sometimes that's the best way to camouflage what's happening in the real world on a construction job, sometimes with the header board slightly out of level with both it and the piece. of the edge at the top of the door looks good if I line up the header board with the edge of the door it would obviously be out of level because it is so long the barn door track will install level in the center of the board header so everything will look good when we're done.

I have a couple of shims under the door that hold it at the top of the carpet level, which is where you want the door to hang after final installation. I can place the wheels and door to get an idea of ​​where to drill holes in the door so my lineman can hit the hollow core door, you just have to be a little careful because you don't have solid materials to drill into most of the door. is where my pine extension pieces come in because they are solid and the top hole in the wheel hardware will simply catch the edge of these pieces built with the dominoes and wood glue holding them together.

There's a lot of strength in this to support the light weight of the hollow core door, so I'm tightening everything up about 90 percent to move the door back into place and mark where the track will secure now with my floor wedge still By holding the door at the correct height and with wheels installed, I can focus on what the height of the rail needs to be to hold the wheels at the level they are now, but making a couple of marks at that level on my headboard I can remove the door and focus my attention on getting the track to line up with those marks and then make marks for the holes in the track to make sure the track itself ends up perfectly level.

I had comments from people on the last video who were sure that I hadn't mounted the rail level in the first place or that the rail itself was a little bent and that was the reason the door wanted to move about a foot when it was closed, so in this video I decided to take my laser level, but I used it to lay tiles. and hang it on top of the rail so I and everyone else who may see this video can be pretty safe. I have the rail installed on a level, obviously I need to paint the header more, I won't get to that anytime soon, but I'm going to put these lag screws all the way in and tighten them, not as tight as the finish, but tight enough that everything work fine, then I will pull the rail and paint, install them permanently and they will let me do the test too. the door with the wheels is not completely tight when doing that, then I can be sure that everything is working well, then I can paint the door, install the wheels permanently and have everything ready to go, just to put it back in its place place if you install the door. like I just did and you have this little bump every time you cross one of those lag screws, it's because you have the little hub of this stabilizer piece spinning, it should actually be against the headstock, so anyway, when I put it back together later It's painted.

I'll remember to turn it towards where the hubs are at the back. There always has to be something. I never seem to get everything exactly right on the first go-around, so this is a good kind of mistake because it's very easy to fix. If your curiosity has been piqued about what happened behind the barn door in the bathroom, let me show you some of the highlights of the things we did in this very unusual bathroom remodel. It's like something I've never done before what came out. with the demolition were fixtures and cabinets from the 1970's, what was replaced is what you would call a minimalist design or what I call a more industrial look that we see today, the predominant colors are grays and whites with a black floor, the shower is huge. design with a freestanding tub in the corner, the cabinets are white laminate with a solid surface vanity and a mirror backlit with LED lights and controlled by Google.

It was a pretty interesting project. I will be making videos. in the coming months about a lot of the specific things we did in this renovation, so be sure to subscribe to my channel and stay tuned if you're curious about how we did all of this and I always appreciate that.