Oh man alive this post has been a long time coming, and the craziest part is that we’re still not done with the doors. But lets get the ball rolling anyways yes?
If you remember, we’ve talked about doors before (here we talked about the inspiration and here we talked about opening up the original space getting everything ready for them)
Here are the rules for the doors.
- They needed to match, and there needed to be 3 (2 functional, 1 faux).
- They needed to be vintage, or at least vintage esq.
- They needed to have heavy moulding,
- And most importantly they needed to be in our budget.
This was my inspiration, I LOVE this door style.
We had our door guy (Clint from Quarter Sawn if you’re local!) bid it out and it came back at $9000. Which was pretty far outside of our budget. And I was bummed. I was at the point where I was almost ready to give up my first born for them, or just throw the budget out the window, but then I remembered that I probably have other options so I got to work.
OH AND GUESS WHAT?! I found this style for our interior doors!!! Stay tuned for that!!
I did what any budget conscious DIYer would do, I went to the 2 places that I thought would have doors we could use. If you’re in Salt Lake you’ll want to check out George’s Architectural Salvage and Euro Treasures Antiques. George’s didn’t really have anything that I loved. They had a single door that was pretty great but it wasn’t the right size. Boo.
Euro Treasures however, delivered hardcore. I picked up 5 of these solid guys for $150 each (because I thought about using 2 for the french doors into the office but decided against it.)
The dilemma that then surfaced was hanging them. I thought it would be a couple hundred bucks and we’d be done with it. Ha haha hahahahaha is that EVER THE CASE?!
No.
No its not.
At least not with the Merc.
This is what we were dealing with. Old jambs, windows and the fact that nothing was straight, even, or plum.
Yaaaay.
The biggest issue that we ran into was that the walls on the Merc are so thick that the jamb needed to be monstrous. So back to our door guy Clint we went. After he came and measured he offered to take the doors to his shop and sand them and fill all off the chips, missing veneer, mortise lock holes, and add a cross piece in the lower panel. If you look at the above pic, the giant vent could not stay so the entire panel was removed. I decided that adding a cross piece would break up the big space and give us a little more visual interest with the added panel. I was 100% thrilled to death over his help with that.
Thankfully Clint also took over the installation, cause that was no small feat. The existing openings were wider than the doors and we had the transoms that needed to go in as well. So between our awesome framer, and Clint and his guy, they were able to get them in and hanging correctly. (In comparison, Court and I put a new door on the back and it took us 4 hours to figure it out. These guys are miracle workers!)
The faux door (the opening on right of the picture where you can see the studs) was a fun project.
It originally looked like this:
S’cute.
Actually it originally looked like this:
And then the door was closed off. Which is not ok in my book. But it had to be fake, otherwise it would open right into our new kitchen and we couldn’t have that. But the transom could be real, so we made it work! The area was insulated, and we painted the plywood with a medium gray so that it looked like maybe there was house behind the window and not insulation.
Speaking of thick jambs, check this puppy out. Its 10″ thick! (Also in this picture you can see how not straight the wall is, the door jamb is level, but look at the original jam and how uneven it is!)
It was so fun to finally see the doors in place, even if they had giant holes in them, and the glass needed to be replaced and they were covered up with plywood.
Stay tuned for part 2!
Looks cool. Love this saga.