No, we haven’t finished the entire house while you weren’t looking! If only! But we have installed Lynne Knowlton’s gorgeous sliding barn door wooden wheels, and we now have an amazing sliding door in the cabin!
Lynne has a wonderful tutorial over on her web page: Sliding Barn Door Tutorial – besides the fact that she has designed and sells these lovely wheels online for people who don’t want to take out a further mortgage just to have great sliding door hardware!
We started by taking stock of what we had from her tutorial list. We didn’t have any suitable metal bars for the track. Could we use wood instead? Could I use my newly acquired router skills to put a suitable ridge into some of our leftover wood? This test was pretty promising, so we decided to opt for wood, rather than metal for the track:
Picked out our door. It is VERY heavy. One of the original doors we found here at Easterdown:
Besides Easterdown’s doors, we have kept all of the old tongue and groove floorboards from Easterdown’s original house. So far we have only used them on the log store. So with a stroke of laziness genius Mike and I decided to see if we could use one of these tongue and groove boards, rather than testing my router skills any further. The tongue was a suitable width, but not really very high / deep. Would it work? Maybe we could just have a go and see how far we get with it?
Floorboards on our log store:
And we had no metal bars for hanging the door on the wheels as Lynne suggests and no metal bending equipment (or experience!). So we decided to just try out, or ‘mock up’ fitting the door. In any case, we weren’t confident that the old tongue and groove would work as a track. So why not just try a temporary fix? Maybe try tying the doors onto the wheels with something just to test the wooden floorboard track. Do we have any suitable rope? No? Found some leftover coax cable with an old leather belt tied around it. Maybe we could use that?
Continuing in the same lazy inspired fashion –
So we had a pause to look at the problem we were making for ourselves –
And we began to think, hey – this is really going to work!
And it looks pretty good!
AND it works! Wheels stay on track – leather straps look good and support the door when it slides! Wow, wow, wow!
Very pleased with this!
Finishing Touches:
Need to build that cupboard to the left of the shower room and a bit more finessing required with the door – handles, a few gaps to close on the sides, but – this is great!
Thank you Lynne for creating these beautiful wooden wheels. We are so lucky to benefit from Lynne’s hard work and inspiration. Quite arrogant and ungracious that we’ve gone so far off piste from her generous tutorial, but we just aren’t tooled up for any kind of metal work and have zero experience of it. Still, recycling an old tongue and groove floorboard and an old leather belt may be a good alternative? I hope so!
Holy Batman!!!! Brilliant work! Even after installing 5 of these door tracks in my own home (with the help of my contractor and the Amish LOL), designing wheels and writing an ebook tutorial.. I NEVER THOUGHT OF YOUR BRILLIANT IDEA.
Wood track. Leather straps.
Gold star. Big fat gold star for that one!!! Well done. I need to have a feature page on my blog of projects like this.
You rock out loud!
Lynne xx
Thanks Lynne, but we were only standing on your shoulders. Never would have had the opportunity to have such fun with this if it wasn’t for all of your brilliant and generous work.
Awesome:)