Making doors

When we designed the house we did not think too much about how many doors we actually have. In most houses these days you will find the main entry door, probably a veranda/balcony door, and possibly a laundry door out the back. Well, we have these and another 4. Not only have we got a total of 7 doors, but 4 of these are double french doors. We have a solid timber door as the main entry, our laundry door is glass on top and timber below, so is the door from the office to the veranda. Then we have double french doors from the dining area to the veranda on the left and to the future pergola on the east. We also have double french doors from our movie/music room to our court yard and finally the same from our bedroom out to the garden on the western side (see floor plan on diary entry 10).

As many of you might know, doors are not necessarily cheap to buy. We therefore decided that we would have a go at making them. After a bit of research on the internet as well as looking in catalogues for router bits that could be used, we decided to go for a traditional mortis and tenon design. If you are interested in a bit more information about this you can always find it in wikipedia.

We did not want to use the traditional thinner panels in the door, but decided to use solid hardwood timber for the full structure. The timber was bought from our local sawmill and is mostly EcoAsh, that is plantation hardwood timber. In designing the doors we found that most of our door openings were standard size, but that somehow the french doors from our bedroom had to be 70mm higher than the others. Not really sure how this happened, but at some stage we probably made a small mistake in the construction of the wall. Not that it matters much as we only had to make the doors a little bit taller.

When it comes to the actual work of making the doors we would like to recommend the following: if you use a router to make the doors, use a router table, do not hold it by hand. We didn't learn this by trying to make it by hand, but it is so much easier with a router table where the router is fixed underneath and only the router bit sticks through the surface of the table.

In order to show you how the doors have been made we have taken a few pictures to make it easier to explain.

These are the sides of the door, with the where we used the router to make the mortis. We used a 12mm router bit and ran this through twice, first with half the depth and then the full depth. We did try a couple using the full depth, but this takes just as long as doing it in two turns - as you have to go much much slower.

A close up of the mortis at the bottom part of the door.

Close up of the mortise on the top part of the door

As we wanted solid timber for the bottom part of the door we cut the "segments" to the required length, taking account of the tenon and then used the same router bit to take away the necessary wood. For the bottom rail we had to cut away the lower part of the tenon after using the router so that it would fit in with the mortise in the sides. The way we did this was to first make the bottom rail like all the others, then align it with the sides or the door, and mark where to cut part of the tenon off. This as not all the sides necessarily had been routered exactly the same.

In order to have a good join between the segments we then drilled holes the middle of the segment and used dowel pins to hold them together.

As part of the assembly process we used good amounts of wood glue between all the segments, inside the mortis and on the tenon.

This picture shows  all the parts ready to be assembled, but before using the glue.

After assembling all the parts together we then checked the diagonals of the door to ensure that it was nice and square. We then drilled small holes above each "segment" tenon and put a screw in each to hold it together.

Two doors ready before puttying and oiling.

After having finished the assembly of the doors we used wood putty to cover all the screw holes. Additionally, as the EcoAsh comes with rounded edges, not square edges, we used wood putty between the segments to make sure we got a nice and even surface.

Assembly line for oiling doors - part 1

Assembly line for oiling doors - part 2

And finally, a close up picture of the bottom part of one of the doors:

At this stage the door has 3 coats of oil but we are likely to put on another 2 or three coats once we have installed them.

When it comes to the window section, we have so far requested a quote for double glazed units using safety glass (as they are in doors). We will hopefully get this tomorrow so we can order the glass and then install it. The glass is likely to be about 20mm thick and will be held in place with hardwood strips. We will get back with some close up pictures of this when they are done.

In respect of hinges we are using two stainless steel hinges per door, with 4 x 32mm screws per hinge. The single doors will have a normal door handle and a normal bolt dead lock. The double french doors will have a slightly different locking mechanism in that we want to lock the two units together. As such this is a slightly more expensive option, but is probably be good to do it well. The passive part of the door, i.e. the one that is not used all the time, will be bolted at the top and bottom. But we will come back to some pictures of these once it has been installed.

Any problems, please email webmaster. This page was last updated 24/07/2008