When we moved into our new house, we knew we would need to find a solution to our backdoor glass doors. While we love the light that the doors provide, they offer no privacy at night. We decided that best way to address this was with barn doors.
After pricing out a couple options for custom barn doors, we decided to try our hand at making them. I am absolutely thrilled with how they turned out. I will say that if I ever move out of this house, I will be so sad to leave these beautiful doors!
We used the tutorial found here for the barn doors. We made some slight alterations for our custom size. We used wider boards for the top and bottom, and narrower boards for the cross board and sides.
My husband and my mother actually put the doors together and I finished and painted them. We used small head screws to screw through the back boards (so they wouldn’t be seen from the front). After assembling the boards, we used wood putty to fill all the holes, and then sanded them smooth.
Painting was probably the most complicated task of all. Staining would have been easier but I wanted a less rustic look. I used Benjamin Moore Advance Paint in Simply White. However, this paint was very difficult to work with. It is a paint that is SUPPOSED to self level and dry slowly. I found this was not the case. It dried very fast for me and did not self-level very well. I ended up having to put about three coats on each door and it was very difficult. I will say that the paint did dry VERY hard which I LOVE. However, I will say that if you decided to use this paint, DEFINITELY get a paint sprayer. You WILL see brush strokes or roller marks if you don’t.
We used this bypass bracket that we purchased on Amazon. I will be honest that the instructions weren’t GREAT but we figured it out. If you have a trim piece around your door like we do, you will have to make sure you put a board at the top. Otherwise the doors will hit your trim because the bracket hangs the doors too close to the wall. Also, having the board allows you to position the doors wherever you want without having to pay attention to stud placement. We wanted to use a bypass bracket so we could stack both doors over to the left.
So what do you think? Have you ever made barn doors? It is such a fun and relatively easy first project to start with!
