I'm in the final stages of finishing my salvaged (mostly) Douglas fir
home entertainment center. This is one of many, many projects I am trying to wrap up inside my home before I can really justify spending some time building much needed tool storage and furniture (cough** Roubo bench... cough**) for my shop. All the fir, with the exception of the plywood, started (a hundred years ago...give or take) as interior doors in two row homes in Baltimore. When the homes were demolished, I was able to salvage the doors through a local salvage resale company that was working with the demo contractor. I used a combination of a DeWalt benchtop planer - for cleaning off years of grime and paint, a bandsaw - to get rough dimensions, and handsaws and hand-planes to get the lumber to its final dimensions and finish. I have had to be very judicious on the use of this lumber, as I am limited by the dimensions of the door rails and stiles for my pieces, and the fact that I have a very limited supply.
In an effort to reduce the amount of lumber I used, the entertainment center I had envisioned had a lot of open shelving. After using it for a few months with open shelving, however, my wife and I realized that we are way to lazy to be "open shelving people." So, in an effort to hide clutter (heaven forbid we just organize things!) I needed to build some sliding doors. The sliding doors I built are very simple, no frills, clutter hiders. I am glad that I went with simple though, because this built-in really didn't need another design element. The idea was to have something peaceful to look at while we sit and vegetate on the couch.
The doors are just butt jointed rails and stiles with dadoes cut in to hold the Douglas fir plywood panel in the center. The main door I held together with Jatoba splines, and the other two are just tacked in to the plywood panel (cheating, I know...).
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| Nothing Fancy... |
The doors are hung in their openings on cheap sliding closet door hardware, which works surprisingly well. As soon as I finish the openings I'll post some photos of the completed entertainment center. The doors, however, really needed handles. They were hard to open and close by just grasping the stiles. This gave me the perfect opportunity to try out an idea I had seen in a magazine (I believe it was a Popular Woodworking issue, however, I can't seem to find the article). Integral carved handles for sliding doors.
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| Here Are The Tools I Used |
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| Integral Handle |
