Bedroom Pocket Doors

The new doors are done, and they are in!  When I decided to change this to a bedroom and move the doorway, the biggest challenge was figuring out the doors to the room and the closet.  While I had the doors on hand, I wasn’t worried about getting them refinished (I’ve refinished every door in our basement.), I was concerned about how door swings would project into a small bedroom.

With these two doors swinging into the room, the light switch would be behind the bedroom door, or the door would swing awkwardly into the middle of the room -an issue remedied last year in the upstairs bedroom.  I wanted to make sure how we installed the door really worked for what we needed in the room.  So, I decided to hang these as pocket doors!

Pocket Door Hardware

To build these pocket doors, there are a few methods I looked at.  The first is the standard pocket door kits, but these are often built with metal supports to hold the weight of the door as part of its framing.  So, finding one that would fit our short doors for under the beam was not feasible. 

The beam really became central to my pocket door plan.  Knowing I only had space for one pocket where the doors would sit together, I had to find a way to hang these doors with their weight supported from above.  I knew the beam itself could hold the doors, but I also knew the solid oak door is hefty.  So, I ordered these track kits, and started planning the whole system.

The Doors

Each door came to me from different places, and are completely different wood species.  But the panelling style and even the oak and fir are all found in our house.  So, these were the perfect set to install in this room.  Since the oak door leads between the bedroom and the library, I can use more oak in our library to blend it into the other public rooms of our house.  While I’ll use the fir door to round out the closet.

Before I could hang these, I had to get the fir door stripped.  It came in an interesting trash-pick with half a table screwed into one side, and a pair of storage hooks.  Every part of the set up is usable; I just had to take it apart first.  Once I had it all broken down, I stripped the paint -there was definitely lead- using CitriStrip and a variety of scraping tools.  It was several days of waiting, scraping, and neutralizing before waiting for it to fully dry to stain and shellac the door. 

When I was finally able to stain, I refreshed the oak door as well.  The original shellac finish got another coat on both sides, and the lighter -bedroom side- got a thin coat of stain to bring its color closer to the finished fir door.  

Hanging the Doors

When I realized the best option was to hang pocket doors instead of using swing doors, the dimensions of both these doors needed to change ever so slightly to fit their spaces.  Essentially… I needed space for the pocket door track and the doors.  

The oak door created a bit of its own problem: the top of it had already been cut out of square, likely to accommodate an old casing that was out of square.  So, I needed to trim the top to give me an even surface to hang.  On both doors, I also had to take up the bottom.  The fir door had a bottom rail that was already an inch taller than the oak door, with all the other dimensions being nearly identical.  I wound up needing to take about 2 1/2” from the bottom of the fir door, and 1 1/2” from the bottom of the oak one.  Now, the panels line up along the same plane: almost like these were meant to go together (despite coming from two different junk piles).

I wrapped it up by installing the hardware into the tops of each door and sliding these into their tracks from the open end of the track.  I made sure to anchor a screw into the rail and a screw into the stile, so there was no one board that would hold the weight of the door.  Once these are cased out, there will be no risk of a door sliding a little too far and coming off the track.  For now, I’m thinking I should put a clamp on each open end to prevent any over-zealous slides.

Next up is putting the wall in around the door and getting casings in place!  Then this room will finally have just the right entry and a nearly-functional closet.  Since the kid moving in doesn’t particularly like or use closets yet, that part will be addressed when we put the library back together.