At work outside

Each door seems to take about three days to do (not full days, obviously, there's a boredom factor to be worked in somewhere), and I've just done day 2 of the final door. I set up what I hope will be a temporary workshop in the hangar. Originally this was an open-sided barn used for carts and other agricultural machinery - now it's the garage for the cars and where I keep the old timber.

In this picture I am using the router. The door planks need to overlap so there aren't any visible cracks through the door, so I put a right-angled notch into the edge, making it L-shaped there. And the next plank has an L the other way up.



What's stacked at the back is (about a quarter of) the original floor of the barn - I'd hoped to be able to re-use some of this wood, but it is in quite poor condition, so it may end up as firewood. But I've used quite a bit of it to make a temporary foor where I'm working - it's reasonably level, unlike the earth floor of the hangar.

The picture below shows how I'm sharing the workshop with the cars. I've clamped down the board which I'm working on by using an ingenious arrangement of flexible boards (cheap cladding) and small clamps like large clothespegs. It isn't possible to use a proper clamp (even if the ones I have were in working order), as they foul the router. They are just a bit too big for it to pass over the top.



Today I got as far as assembling the boards - the edges have to be planed straight by hand, as none of the boards was quite true - and cutting them roughly to length. I will then cut them exactly when the door is finally assembled.

Here's what will shortly be the bathroom door:



The middle cross-piece is sitting loose on top, not yet positioned, but it's clamped together using heavy boards to bring the surfaces as level as possible.

And the last picture shows the cross-piece held firmly in place (but not really clamped) ready for the screws to go in. That was about as far as I got -



I think you can see that these are good oak boards. You can also see the over-sized T-square I bought last week. It helps to get the cross-piece reasonably level before it's screwed on, but as the ends of the boards are not yet level there's no other way to do it. This is the voice of experience - the cross-pieces on the shower room door are visibly not quite level. I call it a program of continuous quality improvement. So by the time I've finished I'll have learnt how to do it properly, by making all the mistakes one by one.