One of the biggest character defining features of turn of the century homes are: pocket doors. We absolutely love them and it’s unfortunate they are not utilized more often.
Measuring Supports
While examining the floor joists from the basement, it appeared as though this house once had them! Sure enough after removing a small amount of trim we uncovered what appeared to be an old wooden track. The bad news was that someone had cut some sections out of it; making it useless, but we have a plan for that. The hardest part of this project was removing the old pieces of track without tearing down the adjacent plaster walls. We used some oscillating saws to cut the old hand forged nails from underneath and after some prying and pulling they came loose.
We still needed track to hang new doors from. We picked up some heavy duty modern pocket door track, one set for each door. After attaching the new track to some trimmed down 2 x 4, we raised it into place. The next challenge was securing our new supports to the house’s existing framing, again without having to remove any walls. The fasteners had to be long so they could travel through 2-3 inches of plaster, an existing true 2 x 4, still have enough length to reach our new support, and support an extremely heavy door. Justin found some ten inch log cabin screws that we could secure from either side of the walls– perfect.
Pocket Doors
Once our new supports were secured, all we had to do was hang the doors, trim, and paint. The pocket doors not only look amazing, they provide an excellent benefit in the winter when they are closed– keeping all of the heat in one room.
What do you think of the final product?
Do you have pocket doors, or would like to add pocket door to your home? Please Contact Us!