Happy New Year.  Let’s celebrate by making some sawdust.

There are still a lot of things I need to do for the loft renovation.  One of them is to make pocket doors to access the little storage area in the eaves, since right now it’s just a hole in the wall that I’m getting sick of looking at.  The doors are not going to be very big but they are in a highly visible part of the room, so I want them to look nice.

Remember the Hobbit Door I made a couple months ago?  These are going to be made the same way:  2×6 frames, traditional joinery, and inset panels.

The lumber itself has been sitting out in the weather for a few weeks.  Wish I could let it sit out there longer but these will have to do.  I made sure to beat them up a bit too, to give them a real distressed look.

I made about 30 gallons of sawdust planing them down.

There are two storage areas and each one will have double pocket doors to maximize the size of the opening.  Makes it a little easier to get things in and out or to go looking for something.  The cut list for this project is pretty simple, as the doors are almost identical.

Once planed down they just need to be ripped to size.

Now that the boards are square, the router cuts a nice groove into it.

Groovy!

The tenoning jig is great when you need to cut the exact same tenon 48 times.

Construction lumber is rough and a little soft, but if you don’t want that Perfect look (which for this project, I do not) then it’s fairly forgiving.

It’s weird.  Everything fit together very well on the first try.  Usually I screw something up by now but so far so good.

Here they are, all assembled.  There’s a little hardware that needs to be installed but other than that they just need to be sanded and glued and stained and finished.  And installed.