Doors Unlimited

Last summer, Doug built a shed on our property to house bikes, garden tools, and his riding mower.  Since our house was built in 1939, we wanted the shed to look kind of vintage too, so we decided to buy used doors and windows.

When Doug saw an ad posted by someone selling five old wooden tongue-and-groove doors, he snapped up all five even though we needed only three.  When he got to the barn where the seller had the doors, the guy also offered Doug an old shutter for $4. He took that too.

I latched right onto the shutter and carried it around the house, trying it out in different spots.  It finally found a home in a corner of our bedroom, decorated with a small wreath hung from a glass knob left over from another project:

Three of the doors were used on the shed, along with some vintage windows that we found at a junk shop in Strasburg:

Now, a year later, as we're working on rehabbing our beach cottage, we suddenly remember that we have two doors left, and we have ideas for both of them.

Doug has already made a countertop out of an old maple lab bench and four legs.  He's going to cut one door down to make a shelf to go underneath the tabletop and use the rest of it to make a small shelf to go on the wall above.

Stay tuned for pix of that project once it's installed in our remodeled cottage kitchen.

The other one is going to make an appearance as a headboard.  We're going to leave the old handle on for added interest and position it at the top:

Both doors have that great worn, chippy look that looks best when it just comes naturally, so all we're going to do is wash off the mold, scrape off the loose pieces of paint and then put on a couple coats of water-based urethane (left over from our floor project--this stuff is getting a lot of mileage) to seal them.

The hardest part of all this is seeing it in my head but waiting for it to be real....

And the moral of the story is never pass up cheap (or free) old doors--they can have a new life just about anywhere.