...use them to make a sliding door.
What? Never heard that one before?
So, what had happened wuz, I painstakingly stripped yellow, then blue, then black paint off my front door and storm door. I stripped, and sanded. Stripped and sanded, then stained and sealed. When the it was time to replace the storm door, I realized I got a little crazy with the palm sander and scratched the glass. A lot. ?? How did that happen? I cleaned and cleaned and hoping the swirly marks all over was residue from the polyurethane. No such luck. The glass was ruined. Lemons folks. Tart, bitter lemons.
Or was it?
I've had a bit of a fascination with sliding barn doors lately and I'm not alone. Search Pinterest for sliding doors and see how many you'll find.
I think this is the door that began my fascination. Lovely, right? I love everything about this picture, and the door is just the cherry on top.
Do you see some sliding door lemonade coming?
Yep, I just had to convince Mitch the perfect use for this otherwise ruined door would be to frost the glass and use it as a sliding door in the dining room. It wasn't an easy argument, but in the end I brought him over to my way of thinking. Next, I had to convince him how we would go about accomplishing this task.
I studied lots and lots of sliding doors. Most used barn door hardware, which can be pricey. When I am trying to convince Mitch that we need to do something, one of the first arguing points needs to be that we can do it on the cheap. Pricey barn door hardware would not get me lemonade, I mean a sliding door. I need cheap and relatively easy.
This proved to be exactly what I needed.
My door is very similar to this, without the dividers.
This is the only before picture I could find. This door is in the dining room and leads to the stairway to the attic room. It had not been painted yet in this pic. Just a plain, boring interior door.
And now...
I still need to frost the glass. I have some frosted window film ordered. It will be easier and less messy than doing the spray on stuff.
For the hardware, I bought 72" sliding closet door hardware from Lowe's. It was around $15.00. In the tutorial I linked to, she said the hardware they used was double and her husband split it and just used half. The track I purchased was also a double track, but made in one solid piece. I forgot to get a pic, but here's one from the Lowe's site.
Mitch cut off one of the tracks using an angle grinder.
We painted the track flat black and attached it to the underside of a stained 2x6 board.
He mounted L brackets along with the track at either end to keep the door from sliding right off the track.
The bolt you see in the 2x6 is just decorative. The board is mounted into wall studs with 3" wood screws. Mitch counter-sunk the screws and put the bolts in the hole covering the screw head. Purely decorative to add to the industrial look. To make it look a little more like the barn door sliders, we purchased a $2.00 fence hinge and Mitch split it and mounted it on the door just beneath the sliding mechanism. Again, completely decorative and non functioning. It was also spray painted flat black.
Mitch removed the trim from around the door frame, the door stop trim. No idea what it's called, but you know, the piece that keeps the door from being a swinging door. Anyway, he removed that and put 1x6 pine in the frame to give it a finished look, and once I prime and paint it will.
To keep the door from swinging out away from the wall, he drilled an L bracket into the floor.
I made a little sock out of felt to go over the L bracket so that the door would slide smoothly. All Mitch's idea. Once I showed him what I wanted, he was the project leader and made sliding door lemonade from my scratched up lemon of a storm door.
