Interior Pallet Barn Doors

I wanted to make sliding doors for the closet in this room because with all the stuff in there, the bed is so far over that it gets in the way of opening the closet door. Soooo…… sliding barn door would be the perfect solution, right? Ya, that’s what I thought, too!

The actual door was about 24” wide, with 19” on one side and 14” on the other side of the door being available wall. So since it is such a small space, I had to make two narrow doors because I couldn’t make the rail stick out past where the wall stopped. I made the doors the size of the hole where the door was, but next ones I will do about 3”- 4” wider than the hole. By the time you take out the door frame, the hole is way bigger, so take that into consideration. That also goes for the height of the door. If you have room at the top, make it a little taller.

This is what the door hole looks like with the original door frame removed and with a little bit of the new trim attached. This was also pallet wood I had stained and varnished. I varnished first so I would not be smelling up the house with the polyurethane varnish.

I drew and re-drew the plans for this door and still ended up doing things differently and would still have done it even differently, because I learned a whole lot with these doors.

So, to start, I picked out my pallet wood that I wanted to use and planed it. Here are the pallet boards before planing. Remember, take out all the nails and staples, or you will be sorry when you run them through a planer. Also, ALWAYS wear safety glasses when planing. If you don’t want to plane the wood, just sand it and use it the very same way.

I bought a sheet of half inch plywood and cut out the pieces to put the pallet planks on to start the doors. I sawed the pieces I needed and then got busy planing pallet wood and left the plywood pieces standing vertically in my shop until I could finish planing. So, don’t do that. My plywood got warped and I thought I could straighten it out when I screwed on the pallet wood. But, no…. So I stacked some blocks and put the doors on them to bend it the other way. That didn’t work either, but I kept going, thinking I would figure it out along the way. More on that later.

So I put the door cut-outs on the slab and put them together like they would be as doors and drew on the pattern I was going to make for trim and located where I would put the hardware. And then put the boards on with screws, and fit the trim to the doors, but didn’t screw on the trim yet. .

I got the hardware from http: www.natman.com/ It is Stanley Hardware.

This is the list of hardware I got for this job:

2 sets of this - N186-960 920 Decorative Interior Sliding Door Hardware Kit 72” Oil Rubbed Bronze

2 of these – N187-010 V1000 Bar Pull 10” Oil Rubbed Bronze

I used too long of screws, and so I ended up grinding off the parts that stuck through with a small electric hand grinder. Works OK.

So I put all the boards on the plywood, and stained it. The stain was a mixture of a bunch of small amounts of stain from Pure Color, Inc. I made a batch and was happy with the color, and I only had made enough to do one door. Ya, think of every panic cuss word right here, cause it was said at this time for sure. But I started mixing once again, and this time not only did I match it, but I made enough to do both doors, front and back, the trim around the door opening, and the door header and footer.

So I got the doors stained and still they were warped. So I tried using the bricks. I left them two days this way, and it was still warped, but not nearly as much as before. Maybe it will work itself out, right?

This was where I turned them face down and tried to straighten them out that way. It did finally get straight.

So I decided to use grey to do the trim on the doors, and stained that, attached it, then attached the handles, and then varnished both doors with several coats of MinWax Satin Polyurethane Varnish.

So next was to finish out the door frame so I could start on the hardware to hang the doors. So on the bottom, I couldn’t screw in the wood, because it is some kind of laminate floor on top of concrete. So I used Power Grab and glued it down. There is a board within the door frame on the floor, and then in front of the door I put another board, because there has to be wood to screw in the floor guides for the doors. I made that piece the full width of the wall in that space.

Then after that was done, I had to read the directions about four times to figure out how to put up the rail because I had to modify it due to the short length/width of the wall there at the door. The area is 54” and the rail is 72”. So I cut it with the reciprocating saw, and sanded the sharp edges that were left. Also, that made the holes not be where I needed them, so clamped the steel rail in my drill press and drilled the holes for attaching it to the wall. Then sprayed it with flat black paint so there wouldn’t be silver showing where I drilled and sawed. There are spacers that make room for the rollers between the rail and the wall. It is all in the directions. Not rocket science or anything, once you read the directions and I laid out all the hardware to get an idea of what I was doing. Be sure and use a level to get the rail straight.

This is the rail.

This is the board above the doorway where I attached the rail.

This is the stop deal that goes on the rail before attaching it above the door hole, to be sure you don’t open the door right off of the rail.

Rail installed….

Then I had to attach the hardware to the tops of the doors. Measure, drill, bolt up…..but I had to adjust to be perfect. Remember, I am working with pallet wood, on top of the fact that getting anything squared out is next to impossible for me.

This is the door with both of them pushed over to the right, and of them open.

See the board on the floor with the guides to keep it straight as you open and close the doors? You have to heft those doors up and set the rollers on the rail and you are pretty much done.

Floor guides. I had to put two sets because the doors are very narrow for the closet.

Doors closed. The one picture is not true to the color but the one with just the top showing is the real color. The perils of taking pictures with two different cameras.....

Doors opened.

And that is it.....