A friend of ours was looking for some large sliding barn doors to conceal a large opening. The room was previously a den, but will now be used for a bedroom. The opening is 69″ wide by 90″ tall. Two doors were used due to the size and they were completely made from pine.

As with all projects, it started by picking out lumber and then milling

Lumber Selection and Milling

The lumber was picked up from a big box store after an hour of picking through the stacks I ended up with a bunch of 1X5s and 1X8s. Milling was started by skip planing and then laminating the structural boards together that make up the vertical and horizontal rails.

The video below goes through milling and cutting boards to length

Mortises, Tenons, Tongues, and Grooves (oh my)

After cutting everything to length, it was time to cut the jointery. I am using large mortise and tenon joints to keep it all together. The tenons are 1/2″ thick and about 2″ deep. To create the mortises, I used a router and a large 1/2″ spiral bit. I call it “captain scary”, due to its size, but it works great. The tenons were made on the table saw with a dado stack.

When the pieces are as long and heavy as these, it is much easier to take the router to the piece than using my mortising jig.

After routing, it was time to chose the corners square.

The second video below covers the mortises, tenons, and the tongue and groove jointery. I cut the groove around the 6 structural pieces with the table saw and also the grooves in the T&G panels with the table saw and dado stack. The grooves were cut on the router table.

I had to work out the width of the last board, so I had to cut a bunch of sample joints to finalize the fit.

Sanding, Staining, and Glue Up

After a successful dry fit, I tore everything apart and starting the arduous sanding process. After sanding, I gave everything a coat of stain. One area that I should have focused more on was the tongues of each board. I missed a couple pieces and it is pretty hard to touch up after it is assembled. I sanded everything with 100 and 120 grits and used water based stain from General Finishes (1 part Rosewood and 5 parts Brown Mahogany ‘ish).

Prior to glue up, I installed some 1/4″ spaceballs to keep a small seasonal gap between all pieces. I used epoxy to glue up the door since I needed very long open time to fit all the T&G pieces.

Diagonal Pieces

After glue up, I cleaned up the excess epoxy and started working out the diagonal pieces. It took me some time (trial and error) to figure out the angles. Since they are only for decoration, they are just drilled and screwed into place. The holes get plugged with dowels, flushed, and sanded. Then the second coat of stain gets applied, and a third in some areas that were light.

The third video below shares the rest of the build process, including glue up and finishing.

Finishing

The last step was to spray finish on the doors. I used Emtech 6000 and sprayed almost 3 coats on the doors ( I ran out right before getting all of it covered).

The most challenging part of the doors was their size. Moving them around the shop always led to me bumping into something, typically the dust collection lines or the garage door rails. Also, don’t open the garage door after you stand these up. Ask me how I know. I spent about 25-30 hours making these. If I were to make them again, I would only pre-stain the tongues on the T&G panels and wait until everything is glued up to stain them. I would also have stained , finished, both sides of the diagonal pieces, since they started to curl a bit due to differences in moisture.