Door Prize
We’re in business! Hollywood is calling, I can see our names written in the stars now: Nominees for Best Door award! I’d like to thank the academy…
Start here for the beginning of the door project, and go here for the final product.
With 4 roommates, traffic can get a little noisy coming and going past the theater room. Sometimes people want to watch sports in the living room and other people want to catch a movie in the theater room. Or maybe there’s a soccer game upstairs, but the Wild are playing hockey simultaneously downstairs. Which is just about 30 yards away… And “upstairs” is really just 3 steps. Or someone walks in the front door, turns on the lights and crashed a roommate’s hot movie date. Oops! Bottom line: Sound carries.
Brainstorming
We originally got the idea to build a door to the movie theater while sitting at a restaurant. Jake’s Grill in Plymouth to be exact. We were surprised when we noticed a sliding door open up to a hidden banquet room just behind us, and instantly knew this was the solution!
We loved the idea of a sliding door — They tuck back so neatly when open, and really don’t take up extra space in a tight spot like Joe’s walkway. And it’s great having the option to leave the room closed or open for entertaining. ^ These two examples are what we liked.
Doors
We found plenty of sliding doors and all sorts of barn doors online. And while they were nice, nothing was quite what we had in mind. There were tons of pre-assembled doors and even more DIY ideas. But the fully assembled doors were very expensive ($500-$1500!) and the DIY ideas looked a bit cheap and required a lot of time and energy to gather each little piece and pulley. So we decided on a middle ground approach – We ordered the hardware and find a door ourselves. This is the one we decided upon. So we looked for doors as we awaited the hardware in the mail.
While we waited patiently for our hardware, we browsed doors. First stop, clearance section. We’ve had great luck in the past with reduced priced doors. There’s usually something wrong with them, but we end up repurposing them anyway, so if you have a creative use for an old door, the bargain bin has them for as little as $1!
We couldn’t find anything with the dimensions we needed. And we didn’t really find anything that we liked. We played with the idea of bifold accordion doors. And putting two doors together side by side like French doors. We just couldn’t find anything that seemed right. So we tried thinking of other materials we could construct a door out of.
Floors and Doors
We’ve had experience with these tongue-and-groove boards before while building the attic. So we felt pretty confident working with them. How we ended up in the flooring department at Home Depot, I’m not sure. But we liked where this was going.
Joe was set on bamboo, but we couldn’t find any doors or floors like that… Until we stumbled upon these:
After taking home some samples, we played around with stains and wood grains. We eventually ended up going with a couple new options from Menards:
I think we have a winner!
We weren’t yet sure how we’d assemble this, but if we were going custom, we figured we might as well do two different stains, one to match each side.
Honey bamboo for the entryway
And Tigerwood bamboo to match the theater room…
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