Make Your Own Sliding Barn Door - For Cheap!

If you're on Pinterest as much as I am, then you know sliding barn doors are, like, design crack right now. They seem to work with just about every style, from ultra modern to shabby chic to vintage industrial, and they SLIDE OPEN. C'mon. That's just awesome.

So naturally, I wanted a barn door for our laundry room makeover, if only because I can't find anywhere else in the house to fit one. John and I looked for sliding barn door hardware online, and the cheapest price we could find was about four hundred dollars - and that's just for the hardware!

You guys already know what happened next: John thoughtfully examined the hardware and announced, "I can TOTALLY make that."

And so he did:

The total cost for this door - wood and hardware combined - was less than $100. LESS THAN $100, YOU GUYS.

Here's the breakdown:

Wood - $40
Wheels - $30
Metal rails & tubing - $25

If you already have the door, then that's only $55 for the hardware - $55 versus $400. It doesn't require nearly as many power tools as you might think, either: just a strong drill and an angle grinder with a steel cutting disk to cut the metal rails. (If you're making the door, you'll also need a circular saw - or a hand saw and a whole bunch of patience. :D)

So...you ready for this?! Then let's get to it.

There are several ways to make a simple plank door. We used exterior tongue-and-groove board normally used for house siding:

 (The opposite side is a classic bead board.)

Stick the boards together with plenty of wood glue, and then secure them with ratcheting straps for a tight fit while the glue dries. The three skinny boards you see on top there aren't attached; they're just there to act as a brace for the straps and to make sure the door doesn't bend:
 

Lock those straps down tight!

Once the glue has dried the next day, attach cross-boards to the door, if you like. (You don't have to, but they do add extra support & visual interest.) Here I've also distressed my door by banging it up with a hammer and screw:

Now stain or paint the door to your preference:

I stained mine to match the cabinet doors we just made.

Now, on to the hardware!

You'll need two 2.5 inch pulleys that look like this:

Lowe's and Home Depot didn't have them, but John finally tracked some down at Ace Hardware.  (I also found some here on Amazon for about $13 each.) The only part of the pulley you need is the center wheel, though, so pull the center pin and pop that out:

Now take a bar of 1.5 inch solid steel (available at any hardware store), and stick one end of it in a table vise:

Bend it down as you see John doing here. (This really doesn't require a lot of strength; the leverage of the bar does all the work for you.) The hook you've just made is what's going to hold your wheel.

You need to clean up the hook shape, though, so next remove it from the vise and bang the bend flat with a hammer:

You want to get a nice, sharp bend, so go ahead and hammer the point all the way down if you have to.

Odds are you'll have to flatten it a bit too far, so now pry the hook back up a bit:

...and then slip the pulley casing in to get the distance right:

Go ahead and hammer on the steel with the casing inside; you won't be needing the case for anything, so it doesn't matter if it gets banged up.

Now test the fit with your wheel; it should fit perfectly, with just the right amount of wiggle room on either side of the wheel:

 John is holding the wheel in place with his thumb; it should *not* be a tight fit.

That's one bracket done! Now cut your bar to whatever length your door requires:

 Spaaaarky.

And repeat the whole process for bracket number two.  (You can see here that John bent both hooks on either side of the bar and then just cut it in half.) You may also want to grind down your cut edges, in case they're too sharp.

When you have both brackets ready, it's time to attach the wheels. Drill a hole straight through each hook, piercing both layers of steel:

Your wheel will be supported by a pin placed through these holes. The original pulley pin will probably be just a hair too short, so you may need to get a slightly longer bolt with a nut to hold it in place.

Also drill holes lower down on your bar where you want the screws to go - the ones that will attach the bracket to your door.

Right. If you plan to paint your hardware, now's the time to do it!

We used a flat black metal primer. (I plan to age it with a little sanding later.)

Attach your bar brackets to your door. I didn't grab a photo before we hung the door, but here's a close-up of the hardware:

Now all that's left is the rolly bar!

This bar is the same 1.5 inch solid steel as the door brackets, so just cut it to the length you'll need for over your doorway, and then drill holes spaced roughly 2 feet apart down the length of it. Make sure you drill these holes in the lower third of your bar, not directly in the middle.

Now my lovely hand model will demonstrate how this bar will attach to your wall:

Ok, so here you've got a honkin' (technical term) concrete anchor in John's right hand. That goes in the wall. That long screw sticking out goes in the anchor. Between the steel bar and the anchor is a half-inch steel tube, cut to about two inches in length. The tube acts as your spacer - very important. Each of the holes you drilled in your bar will have this same set up.

When it's installed, your bar should look something like this:

Note again that the bolts are located on the lower third of the bar, not the middle. This is important because you want your door's wheels to be able to roll over the bolts without hitting them.

Ok, so get this: YOU'RE DONE! All you have to do is lift your door into place on the track, and get to sliding!

WHEEEE!!

I can't even tell you how much cleaner-looking this is, guys, so I'll just show you:

That's all the stuff it's covering up: pretty much our entire pantry. The door does overlap the edge by about four inches when it's open (the wall wasn't quite big enough for it to slide back further), but that's not an issue for us. Finally - no more clutter, and no more dusty cereal boxes!

Oh, nearly forgot: you'll also want to install some kind of a door stop, so your door doesn't go banging into the corner wall or flying off the track. Our stop is a simple L bracket padded with black rubber on the lower part of the wall by those two pipes. You can also install a stop on the rolly bar itself, though. Totally up to you.

I've outlined the basics here, but if you want a much more detailed barn door tutorial (complete with diagrams and precise measurements), head over to this post by Jill of Baby Rabies. There may be some slight differences, but overall it's the same techniques we used. (And I found it - where else? - on Pinterest. Ha!)

Well, hope you guys liked seeing the next stage of our laundry room makeover! We're still not done, of course; next I'll show you our plumber's pipe shelving and the super fun and steampunky way we've devised to hide our water heater. That bit's not quite finished yet, though, so believe me when I say I'm probably WAY more excited to see this than you guys are. ;)

*****

Come see ALL of my craft projects on one page, right here!

Book Review: Graceling & Fire

I've been craving some good YA fiction lately, so I went hunting through all the titles you guys have recommended, and found this one was mentioned most (of the ones I haven't read yet, that is):

Graceling, by Kristin Cashore

I zipped through Graceling in about three nights on my Kindle (hooray for library e-books!) and was later surprised to learn this was Cashore's debut novel. It has the easy readability of an experienced author, and I can only imagine how much better her later works will be!

Graceling is reminiscent of Tamora Pierce's work - always a good thing - with a healthy dash of Hunger Games mixed in. The heroine is "graced" with an unnatural skill for killing, and so is used by her uncle the King as a kind of thug enforcer.

At first I was a little put off by the heroine's name - Katsa - thinking it was a deliberate HG rip-off of Katniss. Both books came out in 2008, though, so I guess we can chalk that up to coincidence.

Graceling has the typical travel-quest and coming-of-age elements that you might expect, but with an interesting emphasis on Katsa's emotional self-control. She frequently struggles to contain her rage, which makes her more human and relatable, and her stubborn independence is almost always a thing to be admired. The romance is predictable but sweet, and parents can rest assured that there's nothing overly graphic in that or the violence.

That said, the midpoint of the story contains a grueling survival ordeal that had me almost tasting the snow and blood, and I found myself wishing for a little more humor in the story - or any humor at all, for that matter - just to lighten some of the heaviness and travel monotony. That's a minor qualm, though, and nothing ever became too bleak.

The ending was satisfying while still leaving one minor mystery unsolved, which I believe is addressed in the sequel, Bitterblue. There's also a companion book to Graceling, Fire, which I already have on my Kindle and plan to read next.

In all, I'd definitely recommend Graceling for anyone who enjoys classic adventure quests and strong female heroines. While it lacked that mysterious "x factor" needed to break into my top favorites, it was still a great ride, and Cashore has conjured a world I look forward to visiting again soon. 

******

Update: Since I wrote this a few days ago I've started reading Fire, and I have to add a mini-review of that as well, by way of warning.

I only made it to chapter three, which includes a chapter-length prologue and is about 10% of the total book,  but I've had to put it down. It's much, MUCH darker than Graceling, and I'm kind of shocked this is the work of the same author. The two things I can't stomach in any form of "entertainment" - rape and cruelty to animals - seem to be a recurring theme in this book, with the animal cruelty already being more than a little graphic. (Animal torture was mentioned in passing in Graceling, but never with descriptions of dripping blood and squealing animals.)

I understand that the prologue is setting up the book's villain, which is why I kept going, but when I realized the main character has the kind of effect on people that makes rape a constant threat - and lives in a world where it is used as a punishment to loved ones, no less - I put the book down in disgust. Now I feel like I need a mind shower.

On a less offensive note, the world of Fire is supposedly the same as that in Graceling, but it's so wildly different - a world of rainbow colored "monsters" that were never even hinted at in Graceling - that I'm just not buying it. It would have been better to establish this as a different world all together than to expect readers to believe that Katsa was able to traverse all of the known kingdoms without hearing so much as a rumor of this place, which is several kingdoms in its own right and apparently pretty darn big. The heroine already seems to be a carbon copy of Katsa, too: blessed with unnatural skills, ostracized by society, stubbornly determined not to marry the guy pursuing her, etc.

The good news is that Fire is a "companion" book, and therefore has almost nothing to do with Graceling. All of the characters save the villain are new, so I don't think I'll miss much by skipping it. Bitterblue is the actual sequel, although I'm reconsidering reading that now.

When I went to Amazon to grab the book cover I saw that Fire is almost universally well-liked, so I can't say if I'm just overly sensitive (very possible) or the story gets WAY better after chapter 3. If you've read it, feel free to weigh in in the comments and let me know your thoughts.


PS - Looking for a good book? Then head over to my Book Review Page, where I've listed all of my reviews so far and also starred the ones I'd most recommend.