carriage-house garage doors

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Ron Bauman

>One of the reasons that it is sooooo expensive is because of the size and skill required to do such a task. I built a set of doors for a friend's horse barn. These were nothing fancy and I had the help of a couple of rough carpenters who were on the scene, but if you want to do a great job (and I would never discourage anyone from trying) sit down and think of every possibility you can and plan, plan , plan. Doors such as these, and I have no idea of their size, could easily weigh several hundred pounds each. Do not stint on hinges. You might want to add some sort of wheel at the center to each door to help bear some weight. There's a lot to consider in just a short email, but there must be pictures and books on how to tackle such a project. I've seen some great work done by amateurs so do your homework and best of luck to you.

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Glenn Madsen near San Francisco

>When an installed pressed metal rollup door comes close to $2k, anything with serious materials and craftsmanship will have to cost more.

I can see a week or more of building a pair of doors. And good mahogany isn't cheap.

The other thought that just crossed my mind is one of security. I wouldn't want the doors gone on my garage for very long. That's where all the tools live.

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Peter Hyde

>Yes. Been there done that several times. Build framed, ledged and braced doors. Use mortise and tenon joinery. Tools needed are a good tail less panel and rip saw, mortise chisel, marking gauge and square, jack and smoothing plane, also a couple of good strong saw horses and last but not least 2 drawbore pins.

Assemble with waterproof plastic resin glue and paint all tongues and grooves with oil based primer as you assemble. Hinges should be 3 48" Collinge type cast strap, 3 per door fastened with carriage bolts to the rails.

Allow 1 week labour per door.

Hope this helps

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Michael Recchione

>Peter, do you have a reference that you'd recommend? I'll check online, but it sounds like you've done this a few times - did you have a favorite book that described the process?

Thanks,

- Mike

Thanks!

Michael Recchione

>This sounds like a big project. It may actually be cheaper to just frame out the opening and make it a wall with windows and a door. I'll keep looking into it. In the end I may decide that $6K isn't so bad after all.

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Phil Joines Krum,TX

>I've built them with 4" and 6" car siding, two layers with 30 lb felt between them. Both sides had 1x6 pine around the perimiter and across the center and cross bucks.

They were build on a large (60'x100') table with an angle iron frame around the outside so they could be clamped square durning assembly. We used the same table to build walls. Enough nails were shot in to hold it together then we lifted it enough to slide 1/4" x 6" steel strips under it to clinch the nails when they were shot.

Re: Thanks!

ThomD

>One thing these days is getting performance out of these doors. If you live in a very compliant climate it may not mater, but if you need a good energy envelope and a good security envelope it's harder still. A lot of doors these days use some kind of solid panel, and then just skin the outside to look wonderfulish. Wood is more or less a thermal bridge, even though it's better than steel.

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Gary Tenney

>Michael,

My shop is a 24' square white pine log structure built using 6"X6" logs dovetailed on the corners. I had a similar problem of how to have doors that would compliment the building. In the end, two doors were site built very quickly using pine construction lumber for the frame with a sheet of foam insulation board inside. Both sides are put together with 1"X8" T&G pine boards and the whole thing is stained with the log side stain like the rest of the structure. I hung the doors with Pintles driven in the logs and two long forged strap hinges on each. They are very heavy and I should have used three on each side. It is a task to lift and open/close the doors since they hang a bit low and I put sort of a threshold strip underneath to seal and even out the way they sit in between weather stripping. I don't open them much though and have not bothered with making the hang more user friendly.They definately are insulated well to compliment the rest of the structure and match the structure well and the cost was minimal. Maybe a couple hundred in materials.

Gary Tenney

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Gary Tenney

>Not that it matters, but the structural logs are 6X12". Otherwise the log dovetails would look pretty funny!

Gary

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Paul in NJ

>Mike,

I am sure you could pull this off with perseverance, determination, and a lot of effort. These doors will be heavy and awkward to handle. You will need thick, well seasoned, and straight grain stock for the mortice and tennon frame to support the weight and to keep them from twisting. The stiles and rails of the carriage doors on my previous garage were a full 2" thick finished. You might want to think of a stress-skin panel type door. I have built a few garage size stress-skin doors using T-11 plywood with an internal frame. They are strong, don't rack, lighter in weight, and economical in materials. I am sure you could incorporate window and screen panels. The trick is to make them aesthetically pleasing to the eye. Framing in the opening, adding windows and a normal door might be the easiest and most economical solution.

Paul Dzioba

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Michael Recchione

>Thanks, Paul. I'm coming to the same conclusion. The space is supposed to be a combination shop & home office. I wanted to stay with garage doors for tax purposes - no matter how insulated and nice it is on the inside, as long as it still doesn't have permanent heat and has garage doors, it's just a nice garage. I'm trying to avoid it being considered another room. Also, it might be harder to sell the house with no garage. But a wall that gets put in can always be taken out, and that may turn out to be the best way to go.

Re: Alternatives

Dave Mount

>I don't know what your building looks like, but the 8' x 8' opening on my shop is covered by a sliding door. Large swinging doors are heavy and awkward to build and install, hard to fit precisely (if they need to seal well), and are often a hazard in use because the wind plays havoc with them when they are open. If you have a place for the door to slide to, sliding doors are much easier and, I think, more practical. You can buy roller track as is used for sliding doors on pole barns; about $60 will get you the track and rollers. They are easy to fit because you can install the door over the rough opening, then do an applied jamb that you make to fit tightly against the inside of the sliding door. For insulation for winter, I applied stops to the inside of the jamb and have two sheets of 4'x8' 2-inch pink foam that get set in the opening and held with stops. As an alternative, you could build the foam into the door, though I think my approach does a better job of limiting infiltration.

I've pasted a picture below -- this was taken after a blizzard so it's not great for showing the door, but you can see it on the left side with the X bracing, and the roller track extending to the right.

Fixed windows would be easy to incorporate; operable windows would be trickier because of the bulk. I guess this depends in part on whether they need to be insulated windows or whether you can just use single panes. Regardless, I would be very leery of having glass in large, outdoor, swinging doors because the wind is likely to catch the doors someday, slam them against the building and shatter the glass (if kids and baseballs don't get them first). In a slider, you'd just have to worry about the baseballs. . .

I did build one large set of swinging doors for a timberframe garage (not mine -- go figure). For that I did the stress skin approach someone else mentioned with an interior frame of 1" (actual thickness) lumber with 1" foam for infill, a 1/4" ply skin glued to both sides, then T&G pine glued on the outside of that. If you do this, you need to start by making a dead flat assembly table to build it on. They were hung with pintle-type forged hinges, the type with the really long strap out over the door. They looked nice, but I don't think they're very practical.

If you want to look at the stress skin approach, Fine Homebuilding had an article many years ago on it, and I think they reprinted it in a Taunton book on bulding doors (not sure of the title).

Good luck,

Dave

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>I don't know, Mike, my first real shop was a large 1-car detached garage in Boston that I worked in year round. Of course it was pretty cold in winter, but a ceramic heater warmed it enough. I loved the big role up door because I could open it and move work into the driveway if necessary, move big pieces of lumber and full 4X8 sheets in and out with no problem. Same with the motorcycles. If I would have done anything it would have been to insulate the existing door and adjacent wall sections.

Pam

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Ron Bauman

>Just googled "carriage house doors" IMAGES and came up with a bunch of pictures. Might give you some ideas.

Think heavy

jim reed @ tallahassee

>As others have mentioned, doors are not a trivial task. Here is my experience. As a kid I helped my dad build a horsebarn. Being budget minded, we did everything ourselves. Stall doors were three layers of 1" T&G pine spiked together on diagonal. These doors were held in place with hinge lags. Stall doors were dutch doors and the tack room had a full door. They were HEAVY and the force on the lags was GREAT. He did not appreciate me *riding the doors* for amusement. Garage doors are much larger than horse stall doors. The amount of force exerted on the hinges is WHOPPING.

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Michael Recchione

>Pam, insulation is definitely in the plan. This will be my home office as well as my shop, and I'll be using it more for the home office bit than the shop, at least for a while (I hope :-) ). So the heating requirements may be stronger than they would be if it were only a shop - staying comfortable while you're sitting at a desk probably requires a higher temperature than when you're sawing and planing and stuff.

The garage faces a very busy street at the end of a short driveway, so privacy is kind of an issue, as is noise. Another big deal is the mosquitos. I have a bench in the garage now, that I use mostly for carving in the nice weather. I can't use it in summer once the sun goes down - the bugs are brutal. That's why I need windows and screens and a door that seals well.

I don't like the roll-up door so much because it takes some of the overhead space, and will force me to approach lighting differently as well. But I may need to find a way to work around that. We did find a company that said they could do an insulated, well sealed roll-up door with screened windows that open. We'll see.

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Michael Recchione

>Thanks - have been doing that for days now. They sure are pretty. And expensive. :-(

Re: Think heavy

Michael Recchione

>I hear you. I'm convinced. I'm going to let this challenge pass me by. :-)

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Peter Hyde

>Yes I have built quite a few in my time. As for a book, the only one I can think of is Handbook of Doormaking, Windowmaking, and Staircasing by Anthony Talbot. Sterling Publishing,ISBN 0-8069-8896-7. There is a brief description and lay out notes at the beginning section on doors.

I have also made them with a 3/4" exterior ply core and added surface features to make them look like a carriage door. Keep the sheet intact so you are limited to 4ft. width of each door. Use 1x stock to simulate stiles and rails and T&G to fill between. On the inside you do the same for stiles and rails but fill in with 3/4" foam board and then clad with a 1/4" exterior plywood. This makes a 2 1/2" thick door.

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>We had a very short driveway in Boston, too. It sometimes got a bit spooky about midnight with the door open, all sorts of people out and about who seemed to feel comfortable with stopping to chat. I got concerned about my safety and theft very quickly, so I started closing the door at night.

What will you do in the home office part? Computers and the like? If so, I take back my recommendation, put up a wall with windows. Is the garage attached to your house? If so, I would only have a regular, heavy door on the side or back, not the front.

How about posting a photo of your house? It may be that carriage house doors would look bad, weird, on an attached garage.

Pam

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Michael Recchione

>The current plan is that I'll probably wire the garage with CAT5 or, if the WiFi reception is decent, just use a wireless connection. I want to keep that part of it for work, so I'll just use my laptop and I'd keep it in the house when I'm not using it. Security is an issue, but not a huge one.

The carriage-house doors would look fine on the house, but I'm now leaning towards either an insulated roll-up door or making a wall. The decision will probably depend on the tax implications - if the room has no permanently installed heat, and has a garage door, then it's a garage. If it has a wall and heat (as opposed to a portable space heater), then it's a room, and I get stuck paying more taxes every year. I've got to check it out.

My granny's garage had these

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA

>and there was a wheel (steel, as I recall) on the meeting edge of each door, running on a concrete arc-shaped track. Made a huge difference, but it requires that your driveway be flat in front of the garage.

Re: carriage-house garage doors

ThomD

>My door is sorta a combination of both a garage door and wall. The big door swings on hinges is insulated and looks like a piece of wall with a window in it. Into that is set a regular solid door. You never know what is going to happen and having a big, swinging door is a pretty good thing when it comes to getting big stuff in and out, or in your case possibly also taxes. But 99% of the time the thing is a wall. It's easy to build because the door is most of the time a wall, I have only opened it a few times since moving in. If it had to do all kinds of multiple functions it would probably have needed very careful commercial construction.

Re: carriage-house garage doors

Michael Recchione

>Thom, that's really interesting! It may be just exactly what I need. Do you have any pics you'd be willing to share?

Thanks,

- Mike