Project Scope
My grandpa came to me for some help to make a quick fix to an exterior door that was falling apart in my grandparents home while he starts looking for a contractor to rebuild one. I always help out my grandparents with little projects when I come back to visit them in France, but after taking a look and seeing how rotten this door had become, I devised a secret plan. Seeing that his birthday was coming up, I enlisted my sister for some help and we set out to completely rebuild his door from scratch as a birthday present!
Build Process
1) Measurements and Assessment
Here she is in her former glory. As you can see, the rot was pretty bad. The idea was to try to recuperate the old iron hinge pieces that spanned the door and upcycle them into the newly build door.
2) Panels
After measuring, my sister and I went to our local lumber yard and bought some pressure treated tongue and groove panels. After cutting them to size, we fastened them together with some braces to stay rigid while planning out the support limbs.
3) Cross Beams
Making sure to measure out the distances a few more times than twice, I then drilled, fastened and sanded the cross beams with screws into the tongue and groove panels.
4) Diagonal Beam and Heart
Following the same process for the diagonal beam, I then got to cutting out the traditional heart that can be found on all of my grandparents exterior doors and window covers. It didn’t exist in the previous door, so this was some added flair we decided to incorporate.
5) Demo Time
It was now time to recover the old steel hinges that spanned the door. With how rotten the wood was, this demo was pretty easy to accomplish. However, the steel was quite deteriorated from rust.
6) Grind, Grind, Grind
Still determined to use these metal hinge pieces, my sister and I traded off using an angle grinder to take away the rust as much as possible in order to reduce the possibility of it propagating even further.
7) Anti-Rust Treatment
After grinding away as much rust as possible, I treated the metal with an anti-rust coating to stop the last remaining bits of rust from going any deeper.
8) Paint Time
Painting the pieces with the traditional Basque green color. My grandpa had painted the previous ones with wood paint, but we made sure to paint these with metal spray paint to have a good protective coating from the elements, especially being close to the ocean.
9) Fit Test
A main reason to repurpose the old hinges was also because the connecting male pieces were hard set into the stone wall as you can see in this picture. Next step (soon to come!) is to paint the door green to match the rest of the house, but due to the constant wet weather, we need to wait for a drier period of time with some sun for water logged wood to dry and for the paint coatings to properly set as well.
Birthday Present
Here is my sister and I standing next to our beautifully wrapped birthday gift for our grandfather. With big presents like this, we like to have fun and use wild spray paint colors to decorate in large font. This type of project represents everything I love about building things: working with my hands, collaborating with people that have similar passions (in this case my sister!) and fabricating something that serves a purpose!
Raphael de Chassy 