The Perception of Doors

You may remember we wanted to make use of the awkward space in the "knee walls" in the corners of the bathroom. Because this room is directly under the roof, the ceiling slopes at 45 degrees all the way down to the floor. That leaves you with very short triangular spaces on the sides of the room, and I didn't want to waste that space. So I made storage cabinets.

They're framed in just below the rafters and above the floor joists, as you can see here. I used oak laminate for the "floor" and "walls" of the cabinets, and pine for the face. (Forgive me, Dr. Hart, for not using redwood.) There's also some stranded board visible in the picture, but that's just backing for the bead board to come.

Of course, nothing was at right angles (or even a solid 45 degrees), so there was a lot of guessing, fitting, tweaking, and swearing involved. This was made all the more awkward because the bathroom is on the 3rd floor and my table saw is on the ground floor. And the lumber is in the garage, one floor down from that. So the process works like this: Down three flights of stairs, cut, up three flights with cut wood in hand, test fit, back down three flights, cut again, upstairs again, swear, repeat.

Eventually, I got everything to fit well enough to nail it all in place and insulate around the back sides. There's one cabinet on the right side of the room (shown) and a matching one on the left.

Then come the doors. They're also pine, with bead board inserts to match the walls. They're a stile-and-rail design using pocket-hole joinery, with trapped panels. If you do much woodworking, that's no big deal, but I'm pretty proud of them.

I started with select pine (no knots) and ripped it down to the size I wanted, then cut rails and stiles to length. I cut them each in pairs so they'd match exactly. Then I routed a groove along the inside length of each piece to "trap" the bead board insert. The insert isn't glued, so it can expand and contract slightly with changes in temperature or humidity. Since I don't have a dado blade, I just made multiple passes over the table saw with a standard rip blade. The trick here was to remember which side of each piece will face outward so that the grooves will all line up when the door is assembled.

Before assembling the doors, I routed a stopped chamfer on the inside edges of the doors with a simple 1/4" cove bit. After some experimentation I decided it looked best stopped 2" from the ends of the stiles and about a half-inch from the ends of the rails.

That done, I drilled pocket holes in the backs of the rails using a $19 jig (new tool!), inserted the bead board pieces, and screwed everything together. There is no glue. After the doors were all assembled, I went around the outside of each one with a Roman ogee bit to make the little edge detail you see in the photo above. 

Remarkably, each of the doors is square and true. I'm getting better at this. This photo shows one of the doors taped into place. Now I just need to source some hinges, paint it all, and we should be all set.