See how we make this transformation!
One of the bigger projects we tackled for the renters was installing a door to the upstairs bedroom. We had used the room as an office so it wasn't weird that there wasn't a door. However, since the upstairs was actually going to be used as a bedroom, we offered to install a door.
As seen in the "Before" picture, the space was just an opening (no casing, no nothing). We decided to install a Bi-fold door to save on space in the room. We thought about doing a barn door type style, however, there was not enough room for brackets on the walls we were working with. Plus, we were constrained to what we could find fast locally since we were under a time crunch.
Step 1: Created the track piece support. We attached the track supplied with the door to a 2x4. Things we considered were checking for height of door, checking for level, and making sure the door fully opened would be flush with the wall (so the door would take up wall space and not the opening space).
Step 2: Attached supplied bottom brace for door hinge point. We had to remove some quarter round so the door would be flush with the wall.
Now that the door was installed, we just needed to finish all unfinished edges to make everything look pretty! This included making trim pieces to cover each side of the track support we made.
On the inside of the room, we created a valence. Since old houses don't have straight edges (have I ever mentioned that before?
), we constructed the three pieces together off of the wall and then nailed it to the 2x4 as one piece. We then caulked and painted to make everything look beautiful!
...read more “A-Door-Able Blog Post”
"Install a bi-fold door
on a upper floor
to finish more on our list of chores"
-Matt Mullens
So with tenants moving in fairly soon, we realized we had quite a few things left to do. Most of these projects were small, some of them were partially done, but still quite a lot to do. Seriously, look at our To-Do list after we already had committed renters (and we finished the whole list before they moved in).
One of the bigger projects we tackled for the renters was installing a door to the upstairs bedroom. We had used the room as an office so it wasn't weird that there wasn't a door. However, since the upstairs was actually going to be used as a bedroom, we offered to install a door.
As seen in the "Before" picture, the space was just an opening (no casing, no nothing). We decided to install a Bi-fold door to save on space in the room. We thought about doing a barn door type style, however, there was not enough room for brackets on the walls we were working with. Plus, we were constrained to what we could find fast locally since we were under a time crunch.
Step 1: Created the track piece support. We attached the track supplied with the door to a 2x4. Things we considered were checking for height of door, checking for level, and making sure the door fully opened would be flush with the wall (so the door would take up wall space and not the opening space).
Step 2: Attached supplied bottom brace for door hinge point. We had to remove some quarter round so the door would be flush with the wall.
Step 3: Checked that the door fits 
. Perfect height, perfectly level, and perfectly flush with the wall! YAY!
. Perfect height, perfectly level, and perfectly flush with the wall! YAY!Now that the door was installed, we just needed to finish all unfinished edges to make everything look pretty! This included making trim pieces to cover each side of the track support we made.
On the inside of the room, we created a valence. Since old houses don't have straight edges (have I ever mentioned that before?
), we constructed the three pieces together off of the wall and then nailed it to the 2x4 as one piece. We then caulked and painted to make everything look beautiful!
On the other side (looking up the stairs) we created trim around the entire ceiling to make it look seamless as seen in this before and after.
We first ripped down some extra baseboards we had to be the perfect height of the 2x4 and track piece support. We then nailed, mitered, and cut the pieces and nailed them together (once again off of the wall). Pictured is 3 out of the 4 pieces we built to create the ceiling trim.
We then *GASP* made a mistake! We had been doing so good building everything off of the wall up until this point. We nailed all four pieces up separately to the wall. Unfortunately, (stupid non-straight walls), our perfect cuts did not look so perfect up on the wall. We had to fill in some pretty bad spaces with wood filler and then caulk saved us for the rest. I have a love/hate relationship with caulk.
*Hint: Use a flat head screw driver to get any caulk/wood filler out of any decorative ridges.*
Finally we painted the trim our Bright White semi-gloss and the ceiling our Sherwin Williams flat Reserved White!
The last and easiest thing to do was to install a door knob. We picked up this crystal style knob to fit in with the design of the rest of the house.
Here is the finished product!
And this is what Teddy looked like during our entire DIY endeavors. #rufflife
P.S. In case you're wondering, yes, the paint color did change from Dutch Boy Mackinac Island (green) to Olympic's Azalea Leaf (blue)!
