Closet Update - Doors

September Writing Challenge - Prompt #26:

Create

I've been posting a lot about things around my house lately. I'm just going to trust that my three readers don't mind. I'm always up for a sneak peek into someone's house - I'm nosy like that, what can I say? Chances are, you're nosy, too. Don't be ashamed of it.

Anyway, last week I showed you the closet we've been working on, and now, it's finally done!

(Well, kind of. There's always some sort of problem - and in this case, we've hit a few snags. More on that in a minute...) 

The closet is really big, so as we were planning it, we decided to make our own doors. Custom-made doors would have cost us a fortune, and building the closet to fit standardized doors wouldn't allow us to have the dimensions we wanted. Also, we have a second closet in the basement (for the water heater and furnace - nothing exciting) that has a one-foot ceiling drop, and it would have been really hard to buy doors for it. 

We decided to do sliding bypass barn doors for both closets. 

Door #1

I was a little hesitant to do barn doors because of how trendy they are (were?). When something is that level of trendy, it goes out of style hard. So thirty years from now we'll all be talking about our barn doors and our feathered eyebrows while our grandkids make fun of us. 

(Little do those silly grandkids know, they'll be repeating the same trends ten years after that). 

But what it came down to is that barn doors were such a good option for these closets! We knew they would be easy and relatively inexpensive to make in comparison to other doors. 

Last week we went and bought all the wood. Then Scotty built the doors while I tested stain colors on scrap wood. I went through several possibilities:

Rustoleum Barrel Brown

Minwax Ebony

Minwax Dark Walnut

Varathane Hickory

and finally... the grand winner: Minwax Early American.

First door finished

Once Scotty had finished building the doors, I spent two early mornings staining them. After adequate drying time, we got them installed and the angels sang. 

Second door finished

Glory, glory! The doors are kind of done!

Now for the problems. We bought the hardware for the doors during a Black Friday sale last year. Our delivery ended up sitting in a FedEx warehouse for six weeks (I had multiple packages held up by FedEx at the time, resulting in a sincere dislike for FedEx, but I digress...) When the hardware finally arrived, the box was damaged. It was only this week that we realized some of the hardware was missing from the box. Scotty contacted the manufacturer, and they are sending us replacement parts. Since they are the last parts that need to be installed, Scotty went ahead and hung the doors. When the parts arrive tomorrow (so long as they aren't coming via FedEx...) he can finish the doors. 

Me being incredibly helpful while Scotty

dealt with some of the problems

But that's not the only problem... there were some issues with drilling holes and hanging the rail and so on and so forth. That's just kind of how things go around here. We haven't started working on the second set of doors yet. Hopefully we learned enough the first time around to make the second set go smoothly!

The kind of finished product. After this photo was taken, 

we swapped the doors around to get rid of that gap on the left.

Here are a few more photos of the basement just for fun:

We moved the TV console we built last year to the basement:

Scotty suggested that we get a bigger TV, and I kept disagreeing with him because I thought a bigger TV would be too big. He went ahead and bought a bigger TV, and well... I LOVE IT.