pocket doors

Pocket doors. They're awesome. Most of you have seen them, somewhere, sometime; they're doors that slide into the wall rather than swinging out into the room. They save a lot of space. What you may not have seen is the framing that's involved in installing a pocket door. When we first decided to put them in, we knew nothing about how to install them or frame for them. After a great deal of research, we discovered that they are SO EASY. All you have to do is leave a blank hole in your wall that's double (or so) the width of your doorway. Then you buy a kit -- we bought ours from the best in the business, Johnson Hardware. In fact, we bought five of them. The kit comes in a giant long box, and contains a header, studs, and all of the hardware to install them, plus of course the track for the door itself. You provide the door.

So. You've got your gap in the framed wall. You hammer in a nail at each end, at a prescribed height. Then you just hook the header onto the nails, rotate it into place, make sure it's level, and bang the nails the rest of the way in, adding a few more for good measure. Bang, header in place. The studs are, essentially, half-studs; they're metal-clad 1x3s. They slip into a metal bracket, which spaces them the right width apart on the floor. You attach the tops of the studs to the header, nail the bracket into your floor, and bam. You've got a pocket door frame.

Once the kit's installed, it's best if you can put in a little bit of framing above the header, just for the sake of structural stability. It's not too hard to bang in a few header studs. Overall, installing pocket doors is crazy easy. We've put them at the entrances to the master bathroom, master closet, and guest bathroom upstairs. We also decided to put in a double set of pocket doors downstairs, between the dining room and the office/library, where we had originally planned on leaving a large opening instead. We like the idea of being able to close off the office a bit - and the deciding factor was when we realized that we could use the antique doors we found in the attic as the double sliding doors. They're solid wood, with dozens of squares of antique beveled glass set in them. I'm looking forward to refinishing them and hanging them; they're the perfect entrance to a library.

In the picture below, you can see the double pocket doorframe we installed downstairs. It's not much more complicated than installing a single frame -- all you have to do is slice off a bit of one of the headers and hook it into the other one with a special bracket, sold separately. Then it's the same procedure.


It may be a little hard to distinguish everything, what with the giant construction mess and scaffolding behind the doorframe. Sorry, not much I can do about it. I'm looking forward to getting rid of it as much as you are!

The drywallers will cover up the studs, of course, and leave the wide doorway open. When it warms up a little, I'll strip the doors and refinish them, and we'll hang them up and be done. The upstairs doorways, incidentally, are also getting antique doors -- we saved all of the original doors from the house and will be stripping, refinishing, and re-hanging them. The master bathroom and master closet may get replicas instead of the originals (or maybe we'll be able to find something at an architectural salvage shop), as they are new openings that weren't in the original house. For the time being, though, we're just going to be living without doors. Not a huge hardship, given what we've lived without so far!

Got any questions about installing pocket doors? Leave them in the comments, we'll try to answer! With the obligatory disclaimer, of course, that we're not experts and you probably shouldn't really take our advice on anything, but whatever.

how to make a dumpster chute

Finally, here it is: our photo tutorial on how to create your own dumpster chute. We did this last week; those of you coming over on Saturday will get to see it -- and fling things down it -- in person!

First things first: you've got to take out a window. This is the window at the top of our stairs; we built a scaffolding so that it can be accessed a little less precariously (pictures of the scaffolding are here and here).


Next, install a pulley above the window. If you don't know the physics of pulley-installation, I can't really help you. I was an English major. You'll note that we bolted a spare piece of lumber above the window for the pulley to be attached to so it would be even with the window.


Lean out the window to take pictures of the happenings below; get yelled at for endangering both expensive camera and self.


Buy approximately a metric buttload of sturdy trash cans (we cleaned out the supply at both Home Depot and Wal-Mart, which is why there are two different colors). Using a reciprocating saw or other useful implement of destruction, cut out the bottoms of all of the cans. (I had high hopes, but alas the bottoms do not work well as frisbees.)


Stack all your bottom-free cans together, and thread chain through the handles (one roll of chain per side turned out to be exactly enough). Make sure you've bought chain that is strong enough to handle the load; ours is rated for 300 pounds.


Make sure you've got a length of chain at the top of the cans to hang the whole shebang from; Don and his dad counted 60 links back and then looped the chain around the handles of the top can, using a bolt with washers and nut to secure it.


Tie or otherwise secure the other end of the pulley to the midpoint of your hanging-chains; make sure to leave the top section dangling free, as you'll bolt this to the window frame later.


Using the pulleys and some brute strength, maneuver the stack of cans upright.


Hoist the first can to your desired height; the bottom should overlap into the next can so nothing will fall out of the chute. Designate that useless person standing around taking pictures to hold the rope in place while you loop chain around the next set of handles and secure with bolts.


Do it again.


And again and again and again and again and again.


Once the top of your chute has reached the windowsill, run upstairs and bolt those chains into place so whoever your poor rope-holder is can let go. Then come back down and heave the end of the chute into the dumpster. We bolted the last few cans together still stacked, to provide a little stability and weight to keep the end securely in the dumpster.


Take a spare can and create a hood for the top of the chute. When you're not using it, you can just take the hood out and tarp over the window.


Ta-da!


There are a few extra pictures in the set here.

how to remove, replace, or rebuild a bearing wall

The first thing, of course, is to determine whether or not your wall is a bearing wall. Helpful tip: if you can't figure it out, don't start your work until you call somebody who can (your father-in-law is often a good bet, as are any architects or general contractors you might be hiding in your closets).

The basic premise of this whole process is that you've got to hold up your damn house. It's a pretty simple concept. So, if you're going to be taking out the wall that's currently holding it up, you'd better have something else in place before that support goes away. So, you build a temporary wall.


Don and his dad put the studs on their temporary wall 24 inches apart rather than the standard 12 inches apart because a) it's temporary and b) we all have big butts. Once it was built, we had an old-fashioned barnraising!


You'll notice that they installed the temporary wall about five feet away from the wall slated for removal, to give themselves space to work but also make sure that the weight of the house is still being distributed fairly evenly.

Once they had banged the temporary wall into place, making sure that it was square, they dropped a few duplex nails into it for security's sake (believe me, that thing is wedged in so tightly that it's not going anywhere). Finally, they installed diagonal crossbars for added support.


And at last, it was time for demolition of the old wall. As you can see, Don was quite pleased.

how to add cross bracing to your floors

There's no special secret to cross bracing. No special material, no special technique. You may remember the old cross bracing between our joists -- it was made of spare pieces of hardwood flooring. For the new cross bracing, Don and his dad just used spare pieces of joist beams, since they had it around from putting in new joists (this technically makes it "solid blocking", since it's just one piece of wood). They measured carefully and cut a piece of the board exactly to fit in between each joist (yes, you have to measure each space, since they are all going to be a little different) and then just nailed it into place.


The one thing they did differently than the old system was to actually add more cross bracing. Originally, the bracing just went in a straight line across the middle of the room. What we did instead was to install cross bracing at every seam in the subfloor. Every place where one sheet of plywood ends and another starts is reinforced with cross bracing all the way across. Basically, this winds up meaning that there's a row of cross bracing going across the entire space every four feet (since plywood comes in four-foot-wide sheets!). It makes the floor a lot more sturdy.

Good construction starts where you'll never even see it. Doing it right the first time means we won't have to go back in and do it again, and what we're building will last a long, long time. Adding the cross bracing every four feet certainly adds some time to the process, but it also creates a really strong foundation for everything we're going to build on top of that subfloor.

And heaven knows we don't want our grandchildren going in and renovating this house many years from now and complaining about us like we complain about this stuff!