The Barn Gets a New Garage Door!

The Joyce Ward Memorial Garage Door

My mom gave all the kids and grand kids money for Christmas, my money went towards a new garage door.

The barn where my studio is located came with two sliding doors that over the years had started falling apart. The hardware was really pretty astounding.  In place and still functional after 100 years.  The doors themselves however looked pretty beat.  I briefly considered rebuilding them but the time-effort-money consideration did not work out.  Plus they would not allow a car in very easily, and getting exterior sliding doors to seal well is difficult, not a lot of hardware available for that sort of thing.

So Caleb and myself took the doors and hardware down, patched up some siding and then screwed them temporarily to the barn.

Here you can see the one door removed and the other still screwed in place. It was looking awfully hillbilly for a few days there.

Here you can see Caleb and the semi constructed hole we cut and framed in the side of my barn.  It was a beautiful 60 degree day in February.  

Here the door is being stacked up inside and temporarily screwed to the  door frame and leveled to the floor.  It's a pretty low dollar, plain Jane garage door.  But a big step up from what was there before.

Here the door is done, usable and awaiting a fair amount of trim details. I need to add wood to get the gap at the top to go away, along with a lot of other tweaks.  The barn was a bit shy of the height required for the door to operate properly so I had to relieve a bit of material from the 2nd story floor joists in one spot!  I used a saber saw to knock about an inch of wood out of the way so the door could roll up with out catching on anything. It was pretty funny when I raised the door for the first time! Clunk! Uh oh....But it worked out well.  You can't see any of the track and hardware details, which is really half of the work.  

Here's the door with the ripped down 2 x 6 in place ready to accept the siding to cover the hole above the door.  That's Caleb who generally catches me before I make any real dumb mistakes.  

Here the siding is in place, covering the hole above the door.   I cut the siding from the old door. Didn't quite match up perfectly, but good enough for a barn. 

So far so good.  Next, I'd like to wrap the inside exposed wood with some sort of plastic/vinyl product and add some trim with weather stripping to seal it up a bit better. Once I clear out the garbage, it should look pretty normal.