Fancy doors

A couple of weeks ago, my girlfriend had the idea to spruce up her doors. “Great!” I said, “sounds like a fun project!” At first it was just going to be a paint job, then it evolved into something more. The doors were going to be adorned with some frames. She googled¹ around a bit and found some sets that were pre-made on Amazon. Problem was, that not all doors had the same width, and most sets had a fixed width of 60cm². The smallest door has a total width of 67cm, so that would leave just 3.5cm on both sides. Aesthetically not very pleasing.

So I started drawing a bit and we tested out several different possibilities and layouts. We ended up with a rectangle of 50x60cm, with a smaller 50x30cm one below it, then another 50x60cm again. For the outside doors, she wanted some colour as well. So we experimented a bit, to get the creative juices flowing. You can’t get yourself too attached to the colours you see on a screen, when choosing paint you either have to pick whatever colours they have or have them mix a colour. Most brands do support RAL colours which have sRGB approximations, but it might still have some slight deviation. When we looked at it together she settled for some pastel colours, but the next when I came home from work she was ecstatic about the flashy blue, yellow and orange colours she choose. Hey, if she’s happy, I’m happy.

To make the rectangle frames for the doors, we ordered slats of 270cm online. Of course, this was a lot cheaper than if we ordered the premade kits. But this did mean I had to get my hands dirty, so to speak. Every slat had to be cut into pieces of either 30, 50 or 60cm. And they all had to have outward angles of 45 degrees. Easy enough, I have the tools to do this. Oh wait, I don’t… They’re still in the moving container. Luckily, my dad came to the rescue and I could borrow his saw. Some quick napkin math, We needed 2 rectangles of 50x60 and 1 rectangle of 50x30. 8 Doors needed these fancy frames, so that’s 8*(4*(50+60)+2*(50+30))=4800cm. In total we needed 48 pieces of 50cm, 32 pieces of 60cm and 16 pieces of 30cm. In order to know how many slats we had to order, I needed to know how many pieces fit in one slat and how much waste is in one slat. I figured I would start with 2 pieces of 50, 2 pieces of 60 and 1 piece of 30cm. That leaves us with 20cm of waste. So after 16 slats I have all the pieces of 60 and 30cm done. And still need 16 pieces of 50cm, of which I could get 5 per slat. So, by that reasoning we needed 20 slats.

If this were a movie instead of a blog, this is where a montage would be cut of the sawing process and painting of the slats. I sawed them in angles of 45 degrees and my girlfriend painted them over the course of several days. Then came the most precise process of sticking the slats to the doors. The slats have to be equidistant to both sides of the doors. and equidistant from each other. When I first measured the distances with the slats in hand, I noticed something. The slats I carefully sawed were flawed. They weren’t 50cm, but rather 49.5 or 49.3cm, I don´t know what I did wrong or how it happened. But there it is. Luckily, this slight difference doesn’t really matter, as long as the slats are in the center of the door. So we paired all the slats so that we had two of the same length. Then paired them again, so we had three pairs per door.

This brings me to what I find most fun about DIY projects. It’s a lot of fun to work towards a certain result, but to me it’s also about dealing with unexpected problems. DIY is more about problem-solving than it is about doing. It’s rolling with the punches. It’s trying something, hoping for the best, but adapting if it doesn’t pan out.

I used regular montage glue and the process was fairly straightforward. It just took a longer time than I expected and more glue than I anticipated. I thought I would be done after 3-4 hours and 1 can of glue would be enough. In the end, it took about 10 hours and 4 cans of glue. One thing I’ve learned about this project, you can glue 12m of slats with 1 can of glue.

Here’s the final result: