The Glidd of Glood Blog

The front door - it's up!

You might be thinking that things have been rather quiet on the door front. Well, it has all taken more time than it should, but I haven’t exactly been hurrying. You might also have thought (as I initially did) that making a door would be a pretty simple piece of carpentry and it would be up in no time. This is sadly not the case.

We left the story with a fairly completed door at the cabinet maker’s. I had to get some friends to help me transport it home on a trailer and then it sat about in the hall for a few weeks while we waited for the weather to improve. You don’t much want to be without a door, or with a partially completed one, when it is freezing cold or pouring with rain.

But then the fun truly began. The door naturally had no hinges, and no lock or even any provision for fitting one, and all these things had to be worked on in situ. The door, after all, has to adapt to the doorway and not the other way around. This involved more careful measuring and fine-tuning. By far the hardest part was hollowing out the cavity to take the lock. If you’ve never taken a door to pieces, you might be unaware of how big a lock actually is, and all this has to hide in the thickness of the door. We thus had to hollow out the hole with a lot of drilling and then chiselling, all in the edge of the door. Leave a couple of millimetres of wood in the depths of the cavity and the lock won’t fit and in this particular door, the lock is perilously close to one face of the door, being only covered by a couple of millimetres of wood, so you don’t want to slip with the chisel. After all the gouging, you have to drill the keyholes in exactly the right place, or the keys won’t turn.

All this took about three afternoons before we could finally install the door and lock it. We had also finished the window, put the mirror glass in and held the wrought iron in place (by closing the window)

And there it stayed, looking really quite beautiful but unweather-proofed for a few weeks. Finally, once it had stopped raining, I got around to sanding the whole door down again to remove all our pencil lines, finger marks etc, and putting a coat of the Linus special oak oil on it. After that had dried for a day, I gave it a coat of the Kaldet weatherproofing oil which has given it a rich walnut colour. Then I was able to screw in the wrought ironwork, looking all shiny and new.

And there it almost is, looking quite unbelievably bourgeois and expensive. But although it may look finished, it isn’t. This is because it still needs the water-draining piece glued to it at the bottom. Owing to its extra thickness over the old door with an attendantly thicker water drainer, this new one will require the masonry of the doorway to be chiselled slightly at the bottom to accommodate it.

And I’m waiting for Jean-David to give me a hand with that. But since Jean-David has managed to fall off his Ducati recently, wearing only a t-shirt and shorts (idiot), he hasn’t really been in a position to do any carpentry of late. Still, no immediate hurry. It’s only taken about 7 months so far – what’s a couple of weeks between friends? So the final photo is yet to be taken. Can’t be much longer now, surely?

Remember what the old one used to look like?

Front door nears completion

The new door will soon be gracing the entrance to my house.

The mouldings have all been made, sanded to silky smoothness and some of them have been glued into position. The door itself has also been sanded down with 100, 120 and 180 grade paper to get to the same finish.

We have almost finished the interior window frame that will hold the mirror glass, but we are making it so that one side of it can be removed and the glass slid out. This will be useful in the event of my ever needing to change the glass. Should it get smashed, I won’t have to destroy my window frame to get it out. The frame will hold it in a sandwich, so if you don’t do this, there is no other way of getting to the glass once the frame has been glued together. These little modifications require some head-scratching and more valuable time, but it has to be worth it when you are making a door that you hope will last a century.

Prior to sanding, I presented the wrought ironwork to the door to see how well it fitted. The answer was perfectly, which goes to show that taking time to look after all the fractions of millimetres really comes into its own.

There is a large double knot in the lower left-side side of the exterior of the door which adds a bit of character, but it also added a hole. As is so often the case with large knots, the wood in them, growing in a different direction to the rest of the tree, is not really stable and can drop out. This had happened with one of our planks, but the position of the knot meant that we had to include it in our door anyway. The solution is to plug the hole with a piece of oak that you shape to fit snugly, and then you plane it flush with the door. It’s not invisible when you have completed this process, but it’s perfectly acceptable – not overly noticeable.

So now, apart from the window frame, there is a little bit of gluing of elements to be done and then we can start applying the oily coats and weather-proofing. This should turn the door a rich caramel colour and hopefully we can start this next week. Excitement is mounting.

The hole still needs machining for the lock, but we may to this in situ. The door is only a week away or so from its final resting place.

 

More door

So here we are, end of January and the door is not yet completed. Yes, it is taking longer than anticipated, but then I had to miss a few weeks’ lessons (knee problems). Still, progress there is and here are a few photos documenting it.

Since last update, the door has been sculpted around the edge to fit in the door frame (well, I hope it’s going to fit in the frame – that’s what all the measuring was for). I wish I could tell you how we did that, but honestly, I can’t remember exactly which machine we used. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the multi-tool bench because wandering around with the door would be something I’d remember. It weighs a ton.

Then we knocked up the central panel out of another couple of pieces of oak. Not too taxing. This has been cut to the right size. After which, it was time to turn our attention to the mouldings. You can think of these as picture frames if you like, and they go around the window and around the central panel on both sides of the door. This is where the door gets all decorative. The moulding for the central panel actually drops partly inside the lower hole, as you can see on the photos of the section. In this way there is a transition from the outer thickness of the door to the thinner panel in the middle of it. You have a certain amount of latitude as to how these mouldings are going to look, but you are constrained by the knives you have available for the multi-tool spindle shaper device. This is known in French as “la toupie” or “top”. It is essentially a spinning high-speed knife. You present your length of wood to it, and the form of the knives scoops out the shape to leave you with a moulding. You can vary the shape by raising or lowering the rotating knives and by deciding how deep you want them to cut.

To get our mouldings, we had to choose a likely piece of wood to cut the initial blanks from. We are having to husband the wood quite closely. Compared to the amount you buy initially, it is amazing how quickly it disappears when you try to make something out of it. A large quantity of it ends up as sawdust. In fact, our wood husbandry has been so important that we had to get two mouldings out of the thickness of each piece of wood. It would have been convenient to cut the thicknesses into two with the circular saw, but the width of the cut is 6mm which was considered wood we could ill-afford to lose, so Jean-David cut the blanks with the band-saw. I’d have done it myself, but I was advised that if I strayed from the line by a millimetre, I’d be shot. Using the band-saw is a slightly zen-like experience at the best of times, ensuring that you don’t deviate from the line, but I didn’t want to waste my valuable wood by making a hash of it.

Once we had the blanks, we had to cut them to the rough shape with the circular saw, then they went three times through the spindle-shaper, and were worked on once with the “défonceuse” which is hand-wielded power tool like an electric drill. The finished mouldings are then carefully measured and the ends cut at 45° to make the final frame.

So now the next job is to make the mouldings for the bigger hole on the outside and to construct the window frame to carry the mirror window on the inside. As an aside, I am pretty chuffed with the decorative effect of the wood grain. There are some real flames going up the sides of the door. Very high quality oak can be a little homogenous and uninteresting; this is not a problem I have here.

The door is edged to that it will fit flush in the doorframe

Two halves of central panel are glued together

This scrofulous-looking piece of oak is what the lower mouldings are made from

One of the mouldings prior to being cut at 45°

The finished mouldings are mounted to see if they fit. Which they do, perfectly.

Door update

Well, it looks like a door now, doesn’t it?

So what do we have here? We have the four main planks all glued together and the three cross pieces have been made. Doing the mortises and the tenons was all quite time consuming – lots of measuring, precise cutting, rounding the ends of the tenons with a file etc. What you see here are the pieces fitted together, but they haven’t been glued yet. And the perimeter of the door needs to have a 2cms groove cut around it so that it will fit flush in the door frame (my English lets me down here – don’t know the correct carpentry term for it).

Next jobs: make the groove, glue the door together, create the board that will fill in the lower hole in the door out of three pieces of thinner oak, create all the decorative mouldings, make the bit at the bottom that keeps the rain away from the inside of the house. Still plenty more to do then. And let me remind you that making doors doesn’t even count as cabinet-making; it is simple joinery. Cabinet-makers sniff at making doors.

Now that’s what I call a coat of arms

Woo-hoo! Look what I found! I got the wrought ironwork for the door back from the painters a couple of days ago. The orc-factory was even worse than the last couple of visits; the air heavy with chemical smells. So heavy, indeed, that it was almost unbreathable. I was only there for ten minutes, but how you can work there for eight hours a day I have no idea. No one seems to wear a mask, so they don’t appear overly bothered about what hideous lung diseases might be visited upon them in the future. Still, they had done a good job on the ironwork and it is now all glossy and black.

I had had the coat of arms taped over to protect it from the sand blasting as I thought I’d clean it by hand myself, seeing as some of it is beaten copper. I also didn’t want the black paint taken off it. Well, imagine my delight and surprise when I found that the “black paint” wasn’t black paint, it was just tarnish and dirt that was covering up brass. Two hours of cleaning on Christmas Day has produced what you see above. What I started with is below. I’ve always seen the door looking like this and have never cleaned it, so you can reckon that it has gone at least 10 years without a clean. I suspect though, that it has never been cleaned at all, in which case it is probably more like 30 years as that is probably when the door dates from. Hardly surprising then that it took two hours of fearsome rubbing with the magic “white stone” powder.

My new door should be finished hopefully at the end of January (can only work on it on Saturdays now) so in the meantime, I have reinstalled the ironwork on the old naff door. At least there is now somewhere to hang the Christmas wreath.

Front door - smoke and mirrors

I was advised to contact an old man you lives in the next-door village and who is an expert on wrought ironwork. Pierre Emch seems to be well over 80 and spends his days messing about in a forge making things. He looked at the photos of my wrought ironwork but told me that his forte was more the making of things rather than the paint stripping and repainting process. He advised me to visit a car body shop in Lausanne where the owner was a wrought ironwork painting genius, apparently. So I toddled off there and hung around for about 15 minutes while the proprietor finished fitting some snow wheels to a small family saloon.

We got down to business and I explained the work I required. Monsieur Ryffel told me that he would send the ironwork away to be sand-blasted and have undercoat applied and then he would finish the painting job. He estimated that the total cost would be about CHF 600 which seems like a fortune for refurbishing a smallish piece of wrought ironwork. But he told me that if I liked, I could contact the sand-blasting company Aisa in Crissier myself which would reduce some of the effort he would have to go to and consequently, the expense. This sounded like wise advice, so I scooted off to Crissier.

There was no one in the unlit reception, which was at the top of a grim flight of stairs in an industrial building, so I went in search of someone I could talk to. I found the manager in a lean-to booth in a cavernous, dark and filthy workshop. Sand-blasting and painting industrial parts is not a glamorous pastime and this place looked like a subterranean orc factory from the Lord of the Rings, the sort of place that would quickly remove your will to live if you ever had to work there. There were loud crashes and the clanking of chains, black dust coated the floor making your footsteps gritty and the air was thick with the odour of noxious solvents. However, the manager told me that yes, they could strip and paint my ironwork in a couple of days for CHF 120 with no trouble at all, so a deal was done. Quite what the Lausanne body shop thought they were going to do for CHF 600 remains a mystery, but as I don’t intend going back there, one I am unlikely to elucidate.

So the next day, I unbolted the ironwork and returned to the orcs. The door now looks even grimmer, especially as I also unscrewed the handle surrounds for refurbishment at the same time.

I also visited the famous Miroiterie du Léman which is the go-to place for mirrors and all things glass. They are able to supply what I want which comes in one single tint in one single thickness – 6mm – so there weren’t any difficult decisions to make. I handed over another CHF 120 and in a week’s time, I will be the possessor of a piece of one-way mirror.

While I was out and about, I also bought the magic Livos products I will need to oil and weatherproof the finished door. They turn out to be Linus, an undercoat especially made for oak (fortuitous that, as there don’t seem to be any products specific for any other type of wood) and a weatherproofing wood varnish called Kaldet which will finish it off.

It’s all going swimmingly. All I need now is a little more time to actually make the door.

 

Front door – eek! Woodworm!

Having cut the lengths of wood for the door, I have been putting them through the plane. This is one of my favourite bits of woodworking, as the scuzz on the planks is removed and you end up with nice smooth pieces that reveal the grain. However, they also revealed something else – in this case, traces of woodworm.

Woodworm is very common in wood but it isn’t usually too much of a problem for two reasons. The first is that the worms seem to move on quickly and no longer inhabit your wood. I’ve personally never seen a woodworm, although I’ve seen woodworm holes in umpteen pieces of furniture. The second reason is that woodworm prefer the softer sapwood and generally leave the heartwood alone. As you are throwing away the sapwood anyway (too soft for cabinet-making), it doesn’t really matter if it has holes in it.

But the oak for my front door definitely does have woodworm holes, and it shouldn’t, so I got Jean-David to phone up and complain. It sounds better coming from a professional. This wood did cost top dollar – about CHF 600 – which makes a cheap solid oak front door, but an expensive couple of planks, and there is no way it should have woodworm in it at that price. The lumber merchants agreed and offered to replace it. Fine, but I have spent 7 hours assessing it, measuring it, deciding which bits to use, sawing and planing it, which all adds up to a sizeable investment in terms of time and lessons in these particular pieces of wood. This was explained to the merchant, who has made a 25% discount of CHF 150, which is a little more than £100. Well, it’s an outcome, but it does mean that my finished oak door is going to have woodworm holes in it.

There are those who deliberately put fake woodworm holes in the furniture they make to give it an aged, authentic look, so maybe, not having to go to this trouble, I shouldn’t complain, but it is a little annoying. There isn’t that much woodworm, and what there is will be confined to the inside of the finished door. Also, this front door is not going to look out on to Eaton Terrace, Belgravia, London W1, but my veggie garden. It’s not going to be painted black and have a brass lion head knocker attached to it. So a little rustic effect isn’t really going to hurt. It’ll be a top door in any event.

I have been looking into restoring the wrought ironwork too. It appears that the coat of arms (see other photos in previous post) is in fact a piece of beaten copper and that the whole thing was made by a guy who lived down the road but who is now sadly dead. I thought about just removing the paint myself and repainting it, but I’ll have to buy paintstripper, undercoat and paint. Then what am I going to do with the paintstripper I’ve used? I can barely tip it down the drain. Frankly, with three different products to buy and an ecological headache, it barely seems worth it, so I think I shall take the ironwork to my local friendly car body shop and get them to do it. I doubt it will be much more expensive, but if it looks like it’s going to be… Then I need to contact the people to make the mirror window. It’s all go.

 

The front door - sawing the oak

The measurements have been made and the sizes of the different pieces of wood – or at least the major pieces – have been worked out. So we have commenced the sawing, which has proven to be a strangely physical process.

The current front door is 4cms thick, which seems to be a little on the thin side for a front door, so we have decided to make the new one 5cms thick. To this end the oak planks I have bought are 6cms thick. 1cm will be lost as they go through the plane. However, the jigsaw we normally use for cutting up the long lengths of raw planks can’t handle a thickness of 6cms, so there was only one thing for it – we’d have to cut all the lengths we required by hand with a saw. Shock horror!

There is something immensely fatiguing about sawing. Half-way through the plank and you feel that your arm is going to drop off. The muscles glow red-hot and your entire organism seems to be pressed into service just to keep your arm going up and down. If you did this for a living you’d have arms of steel and be absurdly fit. As I don’t, my arms soon felt as if they were made of mousse and I felt absurdly tired.

The thickness of the planks (there’s got to be a better word than plank. What’s a thick plank called?) was also a strain on the circular saw. There was no way we were going to start sawing the pieces of oak lengthwise. That would have meant cuts 2m long! The saw can just about deal with the job, but you can tell it isn’t happy. Oak is not pine. The saw will rip through pine with abandon, but oak is massively dense and heavy and the saw can tell the difference.

If you look at the photos of the front door, you will see that you need a length of wood to run the height of the door either side of the window and ironwork. This length is a foot wide.  What does this mean in terms of planks of oak? It means that if you were to get the length out of a plank in one piece, your plank would have to be a metre wide. This is because you can’t use the heart of a tree, so you would need a plank that was a foot wide on each side of the heart, plus the width of the sapwood under the bark which you can’t use either. There is no guarantee of course that your plank would come from the very middle of the tree, so you are looking at a tree that is over a metre thick in the middle. That is a pretty huge oak tree, probably hundreds of years old and not exactly common.

The solution, of course, is to use two 17cm thick lengths and glue them together, and this is what we shall be doing. Even this isn’t simple, as it still requires planks two feet wide which are fairly serious pieces of wood.

We have now cut the four lengths we require and they each weigh a ton. This oak is massively heavy. It is true that they are currently 6cms thick and will be shortly 5cms thick, but all the same, that is only a weight loss of 17%. The four glued together with the rest of the door is going to create a combined weight that doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s not going to be a one-man job installing this door and I have been taking pictures of the hinges to see what their chances are of standing up to the job. They look fairly solid things, fortunately. One thing is certain, any future burglars will not be coming in via the front door. Sadly, they were never likely to, as if you want to get into this house, you’d just smash a window and let yourself in. I know I probably shouldn’t be giving away this sort of information on the net, but frankly, even the most moronic burglar would work that out in about 10 seconds.

My front door looks rubbish

My front door is a sad thing.

The idea of it is pretty good. It has an unusual piece of wrought ironwork in the centre  which contains the coat of arms of the village. Every town and village in Switzerland has its own coat of arms, as do all the cantons, but you don’t often see them on the front doors of houses. Rather than an affectation, I like to think that the reason there is a coat of arms on my front door is that it used to be the post-office, not that customers ever went through the front door. They used to go through a side door that I had bricked up and turned into a window. Whatever.

Behind the iron coat of arms is a small hinged window. In practice, it is rarely (if ever) open, as in the summer I tend to leave the whole door open for the dog to wander in and out. And if it’s too cold for that, then the door and its window stay shut. But still, it is another nice and unusual feature.

I quite like the seashell design wrought iron handle too. It looks suitably in keeping with the whole rustic design.

But what I don’t like – and I shouldn’t think anyone else does either – is the fact that the whole door is made of chipboard. This would have looked fine for years, as it was cunningly veneered to make it look like solid expensive wood. Sadly, the weather has taken its toll on the veneer, so that it has just disintegrated in various places revealing the horror beneath.

It’s not good to have a patently chipboard front door. After all, it is the first thing that people see of your house as they come in and you only get one chance to make a first impression, as they say.

So after the chest of drawers furniture project, I thought that a new front door sounded like the best thing to make. I need a relatively simple project that will produce rapid results as I have only produced one thing in the last year. I also thought that a door sounded like an interesting project – how are they made? Added to the fact that my door with its wrought ironwork and window is a reasonably complicated one to make.

I could, I suppose at a pinch, veneer the door I have, but frankly, it isn’t worth the effort and I am not convinced that thin veneer is what you require in a weather-resistant situation. It would only be a matter of time before it all flaked off again. So instead, I decided to make a door out of this large and ancient plank (barely a plank at 8 cms thick) of larch or pine which someone gave me. It has been sitting in Jean-David’s workshop for months.

But sadly, after taking all the measurements for the door, it appears that the plank just isn’t big enough. You have to remember that you can’t use the middle of it – the heart of the tree – and what is left on either side is just insufficient for the width of the door. Had it been a touch longer, then that could have worked, but it isn’t. Or if it had been thicker still, I could have used it in two slices. So off it was to the wood emporium again to choose some oak. I am now the proud and poor possessor of two and a half 4.4m long French oak planks. Tomorrow I’m going to start sawing them up.

I am going to unscrew the ironwork and have that refurbished and the coat of arms repainted. For the window, I quite like the idea of a two-way mirror. This is an idea I have shamelessly stolen from this farmhouse which seems to employ the unusual design to great effect:

 

It has the advantage that you can see who is coming to the door, but they can’t see you. A paranoid way of dealing with visitors perhaps, though you would be surprised at the number of Polish students, Mafia-affiliated deaf people, knife sharpeners and purveyors of Provençal tableware and wooden Easter decorations we get around here, in a village with only rudimentary public transport. So I will contact the local glass and mirror merchants to have one made up (unless there is some cunning reason why I can’t).

 

 

Chest of drawers is finally finished

Behold – the finished chest of drawers. I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever see the day.

What do you think?

It has had one coat of an oil that fills the pores of the wood and which goes by the name of Meldos and a couple of coats of the oil that I have used for all the other pieces of furniture I have made, which is called Bivos. Both products are made by Livos and cost a fortune. As you can see and as promised, the zebrano becomes yellowy gold and the wenge becomes dark chocolate brown.

The most surprising thing was the size of it, once I had got it home. What looked fairly small and insignificant in the workshop with its high ceilings looks rather large in my house with its low ones. Too large, in fact, for any of the bedrooms really, so it has taken up residence in the sitting room. As yet, I don’t really have a use for it, I mean the drawers contain nothing much, but it does look cool. It has a very exotic appearance and I bet you haven’t seen a similar one in a shop. The zebra hooves look particularly amusing.

What can I say in retrospect about the chest of drawers-making experience? The first thing is to say how long and complicated it is. Veneering is a time-consuming business, but the results can be spectacular. In some respects, it isn’t that hard and it doesn’t require any very complicated machinery. The trickiest bit is getting the edges perfect so that the joins between the pieces are invisible. It’s a good technique to have learnt, as it means it is possible to buy cheap wood and make it look expensive, and it opens up the possibilities of creating furniture with all sorts of hideously pricey and unsustainable exotic woods which can look phenomenal. So I may do more of this in the future.

But over and above the veneering, just making a chest of drawers is complicated. There is the shell to make, the drawers, the runners, the top and the feet. That’s a lot of different bits and the tolerances have to be tiny if the piece is to look good at the same time as the drawers sliding neatly in and out. One again, you find out just how complicated furniture-making is.

The other tricky bit is the furniture designing. I have no real aptitude for imagining things in three dimensions. I tend to be someone who knows what is elegant about something once it has been produced but has some difficulty imagining the thing beforehand. This chest of drawers sort of got invented as we went along. I am very happy with the way we imagined the pattern of the wood grain. We got that right and we could easily have got it wrong. The piece would look totally different if we had arranged the veneer in a different direction. With hindsight, I would have made the chest of drawers a little smaller, and would perhaps have had the top a fraction larger in relation to the body. But overall, I am very pleased with it. This is non-throwaway furniture.

Next project coming up.