Pantry French Doors

As mentioned in a previous post, remodels never seem to be contained in the same room that they were intended to be in. Adjacent rooms always seem to pulled into the surge of improvement. Now that the bathroom door was moved down towards the pantry, it now interefered with the location of the existing pantry door. Henceforth, a need for a new pantry door was born.

With the layout of the kitchen & bathroom, the pantry door now needed to swing IN to the pantry. With the narrow-ness of the pantry, I thought it best for mobility in the pantry if there were two small doors (french doors), rather than one 30" wide. Several months ago, I came across these doors in an antique/salvage store in Portland and knew I had to have them, though I would not need them anytime soon.

Here's a cell phone snapshot of the doors in the store.

I didn't think about taking any before shots until I was well into the work. I first started out trimming the door down a half inch on each side, then a good 4" from the bottom. I was fortunate to have the door remain intact after all that removal.

After the trim down, when I went to install the door jamb, the framed doorway seemed to be racked, I assume by the brunt of the east winds that batter the house. In order to get the jamb level, I need to cut away a bit of the door frame. Hack job.

A close up of the mortise job for the hinge on the door:

After 17 hours of door size modification, door frame notching, shimming, jamb leveling, mortising, more leveling, planing, and sanding, the doors are in and working!

The last step was adding the door hardware, which I got from Rejuvenation. Since there's not a whole lot of room, I used knobs that would normally be used for a screen door, along with some ball catches at the top. The only thing left to do is gasket and a repaint.