Bigger Than a Barn Door

      Most of this week, I spent building, wrapping and hanging barn doors.  Monday, as I recovered from the Holiday weekend, I took advantage of the nice weather to repair another piece of damage from the Memorial Day 100 mph wind.

 

     The “lintel cover” got torn off and I apparently never took a good picture of that damage.  But here it is restored.

    I also decided to burn the trash, not much wind, etc.  Everything sure is dry.

 

    Fortunately, I had the garden hose and nozzle at the ready. I've been down that road before.  Actually I let it burn awhile just to get rid of some of the combustibles around the trash receptacles.

    I’m not a fan of pot lights.  They are inefficient, even the LED ones, because it takes so many of them to get any kind of light at all.  Plus, each one pokes up into the attic, a sort of chimney letting heat out into the attic in the winter, and heat in from the attic during the summer.  We started out with five, added a sixth, and now a seventh.  We had a hard time finding the one to match the others, but we did find it in a Ft. Collins Home Depot.  Then when I put it in, the bulb didn’t work.  Of course that endeared pot lights to me further.

 

                   Well, on Tuesday, on to barn-door building.  Here is what I was replacing.

  

 

                                                 And here is the replacement.

 

    Two of the smaller doors were a plywood sandwich made of 5/8” and 9/16” plywood laid perpendicular.  Pretty heavy.  It worked because the dimensions were 8 feet.

 

     The west barn door was 10 feet wide, so I used one layer of plywood and framed and strengthened with 1 X 6’s.  Not quite so heavy.

 

 

     We had 26 gauge sheets 41” X 10’6” to wrap each door.  Pretty hard to handle with one person.  I had to use one--by’s to stiffen the sheets while bending them, or they would crumple and spoil the pretty right-angle bends.

    On Saturday, since I had left-over wood and metal, we decided to make a new walk-in door, too.

 

     The hanging wasn’t near as difficult as the bigger ones.  Hinges instead of rollers and tracks.  Only the east barn door could be mounted by starting the rollers in the tracks and rolling the door along.  The big west door had to be pushed up into the roller brackets, then swung out enough to get the bolts into the brackets from the inside.

     All and all, it was pretty strenuous work for an old guy, lots of heavy lifting sheets of plywood, and “knee” work, putting in the screws to hold the metal in place.

     I did take off a little time to attend a book-signing by local author Bob Day.  He was at the library Wednesday evening.  We already have the books he was selling, so no autograph this time.

 

    The kitchen floor lays in waiting.  More knee work.  I’ll probably have a knee-jerk reaction, especially if Home Depot doesn’t get our flooring in pretty soon.