Man Doors for Barn!

[Mack]

We ordered the workshop barn kit with sliding barn doors and a "man" door.  When we started building the shop, we found a need for a couple more doors.  The building crew chief suggested that I build the doors to match the man door that came with the kit.  He even laid out a "form" that I could use to build the doors.  I ended up constructing five additional doors -- one to the mechanical room, one to the loft, one to the bath, one to the loft closet, and one to the pumphouse.  If nothing else, I used up a lot of the left-over lumber.

All the doors were made with 1X10" shiplap boards that were nominal 1" thick.  One side was rough and the other side had been planed.  So, the actual thickness was more like 7/8".  I used a "double Z" frame for all except the pumphouse door.  The framing was shiplap that I have ripped to about 3 or 4", depending on the size of the door (each one turned out to be a different size -- no standardization, here!?).  I'm not sure that it really mattered, but I positioned the diagonal frame/brace so that the high/top end of the brace was on the outside of the door and the lower/bottom end of the diagonal brace was on the hinge side.  That meant that some of my doors actually were "S" frames instead of "Z". 

I was able to match the latch hardware that came with the one man door in the kit by ordering through Ace Hardware.  That worked out well.  The hinges are standard butt hinges with false "straps" added.  The sliding barn doors had these "decorative" straps to use, but that looked kinda funny to me to have a hinge on a sliding door.  So, I cut these straps to appropriate length, again depending on the size of the door, and added them next to the hinges.  Although the drawings with the kit showed the hinges on the same side as the Z braces, we chose to put the hinges and the braces on opposite sides.  That was for security as much as anything else on the man door to the outside, but it kept one side of the door from looking like a plain, blank piece of wood.

Even though every one of the doors had to be trimmed down to fit the door frame (I'll blame that on the crew chief's requested dimensions, not on my own measurement, of course), we were able to get them to fit pretty well.  Come to think of it, I didn't trim the pumphouse door; I made all the measurements on it, PERSONALLY.

Closet door on "form"
Closet door installed with hardware
Mechanical room door showing Z bracing