Handcrafted
Closet Doors
HOME RENOVATION
We wanted to replace the downstairs linen closet with a full length coat closet. That meant we needed to redesign the inside space, tearing out the shelves and replacing this with a place where we could store coats, backpacks, and shoes. We also wanted to replace the boring white cabinet doors with full length double doors that I decided to build myself. Something amusing I discovered when doing the demolition was the tacky wallpaper that was under our stucco walls.
YIKES!
After dimensioning and straightening the lumber, the first big step was routing the boards that formed the frame of the door. As you can see looking at the profile of the wood below, the bottom has rabbets, and the top has roundovers. The purpose of the roundover is to make it look pretty. If you look around your house you’ll likely notice that much of the furniture has these. The purpose of the rabbet is to create an L-shaped notch along the door's inner frame that the panels can be inserted into.
As always the part you imagine will be easy on a project turns out to be the most challenging. The first challenge with the doors was jointing the mitered corners. In theory it sounds easy: 45 degree angles fit together to form corners in a rectangle. The problem is that if the angle is off even a teensy bit, this is compounded as one corner goes to the next, then the next, and by the time you’re at the fourth corner you have a gap. When you have a tall door like I do, any error becomes larger as it travels along the board. That is, if two lines are not perfectly parallel, the longer you travel on that line the bigger the distance grows.
Doing some research online I found that pretty much everyone has this problem with getting mitered corners to fit. In other words, they never do. So I cut my angles as accurately as I could, even hand sanding the fourth miter cut to fit better, and then used a trick to hide the gaps. I mixed sawdust from the wood with glue to make a putty that exactly matched the color of my wood, since the putty was made with my wood, and then sanded that smooth. The result, as you can see, was mitered corners that look like they fit perfectly, no gaps.
The next unexpected challenge was the glue up. I did anticipate a challenge in clamping the corners together. The miter corner clamp I bought from Harbor Freight did not work at all, so I returned it. I ended up making the corner clamps myself by taking a 45 degree triangular piece of wood that I had from cutting the mitered corners, and gluing that to a scrap of plywood. This allowed me to clamp these jigs to the wood frame and use a third clamp on those triangles to hold the corners together.
The surprise came when I fit the plywood panels into the frame and found that my clamps did not reach past the frame. So I had to improvise again with wood scraps to extend the reach of my clamps.
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With everything glued together and sanded, I was ready to stain the doors. I followed this with polyurethane, followed by wet sanding at 300 grit, followed by another coat of poly, finishing up with wet sanding with 1000 grit and buffing with bees wax.
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The last step was adding the handles, attaching the doors to the frame with the hinges, and then putting all of that into place on our closet. Ironically I had anticipated that this would be challenging and it turned out to be rather easy. All said and done, I'm really happy with the result, and think it really helps to accent the space with the other wood elements. You can hover over the image below to see what the the doors looked like before (brrrrr!). Note that hover does not work on mobile, but really you should not be looking at this site on a mobile since it's too small to see all the pretty stuff.
