Front Door Build

Back in 2009 we needed a new front door. The existing one was badly warped and had evidently seen first light of day in the 1970s with all of the absence of style that entails. We'd have loved an exact replica of the original, which a few houses in our road still had, but we received quotes of between £4,000 & £10,000 (at 2009 prices!) which was completely out of the question for us at the time.

So I began to consider the feasibility of building my own. Now when you bear in mind that I'd previously done little in the way of woodwork beyond replacing the odd floorboard or joist, you can begin to appreciate the scale of the task. So it was the internet to the rescue and, after a lot of research, it appeared that mortise & tenon construction was the (only) way forward. So I bought a decent router, a mortise & tenon jig and did a lot of measuring and drawing.

Eventually I had a plan so I bought some cheapo B&Q redwood and, with neither hope nor expectation, I set about attempting to build a door. Now I've got to be honest: At this point it was more an experiment than an actual project and I fully expected to end up throwing the whole lot in the bin. However, beyond my wildest hopes, it actually began to take shape. Sure, with my meagre knowledge and equipment compromises had to be made: I pushed my poor router jig way beyond it's design envelope and even then I wasn't able to use fancy (and proper) techniques, like wedged tenons, but in the end it was okay: I built the door using blind tenons, as deep as my router allowed, and draw-bored them into place with dowels. And the end result was plenty strong enough.

And here we go with the dry fit: Blimey, it even looks a bit like a door!

Then the glue up, I was doing this in winter so I moved the door into the house at this point. The bottom panels are 18mm ply, routered into the rails and styles by about 25mm. Incidentally, the wet looking stains around the bottom panels aren't glue, they're preservative and per traditional practice, the panels themselves aren't glued but floating.

And the trial fit - after a bit of trimming it's getting there:

Then the Applied Mouldings being, er... Applied. These were pinned & glued into position:

The next stage was sanding down, painting and then glazing. For the paint I used Dulux Weathershield - a three stage process. For the glass, I produced my own drawings and had these sealed units made as close to the original style as I could get. They were the most expensive part of the whole project but a whole load cheaper than real leaded lights. And looking good:

Then it was time for the side panel. This was made using exactly the same method as the door of which it is really just a smaller version. The trial fit:

And the finished article:

This was a massive learning curve for me and completing it gave me the confidence to take on a few other projects subsequently. It's not perfect and there are a few things that I would have done a bit differently, mostly I'd have used better quality wood if I'd known that it was going to work so well! But overall I'm extremely pleased with the result. And 10 years on it's still going strong.

Update January 2020: It's been a while since I updated this page and I've received a few questions about the detail of how I create the mortise and tenon joints for my projects. Essentially, I use a Trend Mortise & Tenon jig, like this:

There's plenty of instructional videos about the use of this jig on the web so I won't elaborate here but it involves using the jig in conjunction with different sized collars on your router in order to cut the mortise & tenon with one setting in what should, once set up, be an almost automated processs (well, apart from your manual labour pushing the router around, that is!).

It generally works well but there are some pitfalls: The jig is really designed for smaller workpieces than shown here and it depends for accuracy on the wood being squarely cut all round without bowing or cupping, which it seldom is. So allowances and adjustments sometimes have to be made on the fly to get things accurately lined up.

Bearing in mind the limitations of both jig and router, I start out cutting the tenons by hand. I accurately cut the shoulders of the tenon all around the workpiece with a tenon saw and then roughly chop out the cheeks and ends of the tenon with a chisel. The tenon is then finished to size using the jig. This speeds up the process and minimises wear on the router and bits.

Again, due to size limitations I don't use the jig for cutting the mortises, I just mark up carefully and use the router with a parallel guide. After glue-up the tenons are pinned in position with dowels. The tenon shown above was used on my most recent project: A garden gate built for an elderly relative. In the picture the gate and hardware are just wedged into position to check the initial fit.

And the finished article from the other side.

And in true Blue Peter tradition, here's one I did earlier. It's a robust construction method.

As you can see from the rusty hardware, this one's been up for a few years and is holding up just fine.