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?