I’ve been wanting to build some new doors for my shop for a while to replace the temporary plywood ones shown here, but the material costs were a bit prohibitive so I started searching around for alternatives.

I found this pair of old barn doors that were the perfect width for what I needed, the only problem was they were about a foot too tall so I’d have to cut them down and rebuild the bottom portion of each door. The next series of photos will show the process in depth.

First step is cutting the door to its final height using the track saw. I use the track saw instead of trying to push the door across my table saw because it’s more accurate and safer to do it this way.

After the bottom portion of the door is removed I needed to remove the pieces of the stiles (the vertical elements of the door) and the bits of the center panels so I could isolate the bottom rail (horizontal elements of the door).

Here you can see the rail after I removed the extraneous pieces. After this I cut off the original extended tenons from the rail (those “ears” that are sticking out on each side). Those extended tenons help increase the structural rigidity of the door, but I can’t reuse them in this case without completely taking the door apart which I didn’t want to do, so I’ll reinforce that area of the door in a later step.

Next step is to measure the height of the bottom rail so I know where to make my next cuts on the door.

Using my track saw again, I line up the track with the bottom rail height measurement and then cut out the center of the door, making sure not to cut the outer stiles of the door.

After making the cut, I remove the cut off pieces of panel and inner stiles. This space is where the bottom rail will go.

This door was originally built with a rail-and-stile technique where the rails and stiles have interlocking profiles to nestle together snugly. In this case, the original builder used a rounder profile, and luckily I had the matching router bit sets already in my tool collection. I used my festool router to cut the rail profile into the ends of the inner stiles.

Here you can see the rail profile, which is just the inverse of the stile profile cut.

The original panels were tapered at the bottom in order to slide into the bottom rail, but since I cut them off I removed that tapered bit and had to redo it. I started out with a straight bit in my laminate trimmer to remove the bulk material.

With the bulk material removed, I used my chisels to taper the ends so they’d slide nicely into the bottom rail.

The bottom rail is now ready for a dry fit to test everything out and check for any last minute adjustments that may be needed.

I mentioned earlier how I would need to reinforce the door structure since I had removed the original extended tenons from the bottom rail. I added four of these long floating tenons (or “dominoes”) on each side of the door using my festool domino joiner. These dominoes are made from sapele, a tropical wood that’s good for use outdoors. I could probably get away with the standard beech dominoes, but I had these sapele ones on hand and it never hurts to overbuild things.

Each side of the door gets four of these dominoes which are driven in from the outside, glued in place, then clamped overnight.

This is the rebuilt door reassembled and ready for the next stages.

Here you can see the difference in height. The original doors were around 108” tall and ended up around 94” tall when I was done.

Once I was done with one door, I repeated the process with the second door.

The finishing process involved some epoxy work to fill a few voids, then a lot of sanding to remove the old paint as much as possible. Then I did 3-4 coats of oil-based primer, and finished the doors off with an exterior grade topcoat. Because these doors were so large, I couldn’t attach the full jambs ahead of time and install them as a pre-hung unit. Instead, I attached a jamb to each door, then moved them into place with my dollies. If you’re working with large heavy doors, these dollies from Door Stud are invaluable, especially if you work alone like me.

After I got each door into position, I secured the jambs to the framing, installed the upper jamb, and then put on the hardware. After that I replaced some missing and broken glass in these doors with antique glass that was salvaged from a friend’s 1860’s era home near my shop. I don’t know the age of these doors, but the original glass was fairly wavy and the antique glass I used was a great match. Last thing to do was install the exterior trim and capping.

The final doors make a great addition to the shop. Next up will be installing a dark green vertical metal siding and then Chester County field stone to the cinder block portions of the walls to match the stone on our home. The color of these doors, Sherwin William’s “Kaffee” (SW6104), was chosen to complement that future field stone.

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The original temporary doors I built had a dog door for Sydney but after all the work I did on these doors I couldn’t bring myself to cut a hole in them, so I moved her dog door to the back of the shop.