With all the white and simple details we had chosen for the rest of the house, I wanted something a bit more rustic and imperfect so I had initially talked to our contractor about building a door for us. But we needed a huge door ( to be exact) and then we needed two of them, because during the re-design of Phase 2, we suddenly ended up with an entry closet that needed some kind of door.
So we needed 2 doors that could be barn doors. Plus we needed the hardware. So, I started to search for DIY Barn Doors. And after all kinds of blog posts about true DIY doors, I landed at a website for a company called Artisan Hardware. I immediately loved their door designs and the hardware packages seemed within our budget. When I discussed with our contractor that I could get the door and the hardware for about $900 per door, he smiled and said, "Just order it."
I had my door design and I had the hardware that I wanted but I had no idea if I should order it painted or stained. The problem was that I was ordering this door before we had our new floors picked out and it makes no sense to have a door stained or even painted if you don't know what color wood the floors would be. I could sense that I was going at this all backwards and I should have found the patience to wait until we had a floor design but we needed to keep on with all the decisions and this was one that felt very exciting. And, the had a long wait time....so I had to order these doors!
So, I ordered them untreated and figured I could stain them myself. How hard could it be?
I ordered the Horizontal Panel Interior Door and Classic Top Mount Barn Door Hardware.
The hardware arrived first - in the raw silvery finish which I chose to coordinate with the stainless steel and gray finishes throughout the rest of the house. I was so excited. I eagerly waited for the pictures from production of our completed door. A few weeks went by (as expected) and when I finally got a picture of the door, I realized a big mistake: this design of door has a metal case around the back that wraps around the outer edge of the door. This metal casing keeps the door together. This metal casing in black. But I had ordered raw silver hardware. It wasn't going to match.
I spent a day thinking about it and realized that at this point in the game, I couldn't settle for just ok, as I would be seeing this mismatched metal hundreds of times a day. I called customer service and we came up with a solution that worked for both of us as the image on the website does not clearly show the metal edging on the door. I felt good about ordering the right color and figured I could use the raw finish hardware on another project. All that was left was to wait for the doors.
I don't remember the exact day they arrived, but it went something like this:
At 3:45pm, an out of breath UPS driver knocked on our temporary front door. "I have a delivery for you but my truck is too big to come to your house. So it's double parked in front on city hall down the street. You'll need to come unload it there." Oh, ok, "I'll be right there." Then he laughed and said, "Oh you can't do it alone. It's huge and it's heavy and you need tools and crow bar." What the hell! I grabbed one of the guys who already on his way home at 4pm, we grabbed some gloves, some tools and the keys to our Sprinter van. I drove the van down the street, parked in the yellow across from city hall and laughed out loud when I saw the huge UPS freight truck parked in the red. The driver opened the back and inside one big
And presenting.....
Barn Door #1
Barn Door #2
