Hanging Barn Door DIY – Working out some Issues…

Our hanging barn door has always had issues. Firstly, when I framed in all of the doors of this house back during the renovation, I just made them standard size. After that (of course) I realized I wasn’t going to be buying new doors for this house because, by some kind of miracle between extra doors I found out in the barn and the doors I salvaged out of here, I had the EXACT amount I needed. So, when I should have framed in for each individual door, I was left modifying existing finished doorways to accommodate a whole range of different door sizes… It was worth it but also a major headache.

This doorway with this hanging barn door is a perfect example of, “oh yeah, well… if I had known that this was the door I was going to be using here…”

You can see that the door was initially WAY too short for the doorway when I first put it up.

When I painted this space out this hanging barn door needed to be uninstalled so I knew I would be lowering it as the first adjustment to make it work better.

I reinstalled it with only about an inch to spare above the floor.

This is the hanging barn door hardware I’m using. I like it fine and its pretty easy to install and I didn’t even need sheetrock anchors because I was able to go right into studs with torque screws.

(Hanging door hardware is seriously expensive and I am wholly impressed with this hardware at way less than $100…)

I levelled the bar as I went finding out that over the years the doorway is even less level than when I first did this.

This side of this floor of this house is the worst when it came to NOTHING BEING LEVEL.

It had not been supported correctly before and we did all we could when putting in a beam to get as much of the sag out of it as we could.

This is a 100 year old home.

There is no perfection here.

We did all that we could.

When I was framing in up here I had to compensate a lot to make things look right and also attempt to get everything as level as possible…

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to do something “wrong” to make it look “right” with everything else around it lol, oh the joys of working on an old home.

I built this doorframe “right” so it was actually level and the same height on either side when I framed it in.

None of the room is level so it makes the door frame look unlevel… sighs… sighs again… I have the same problem with a couple of other doorframes in the house but doors HAVE to be level so either the door looks totally wrong or the door frame and the door get to look wrong together…

It gets worse lol

So clearly the house has settled a bit so the door frame in this case is no longer level but not as bad as the room…

I put the hanging barn door back on its track and felt like I had at least improved the functionality of the situation.

At least now there’s no big gap at the floor!

Yes, there is a gap at the top now, but it’s camouflaged by the rod at least.

Next was stopping the hanging barn door from hitting the trim every time we actually used it.

This was a tough one for me.

Because the floor is uneven and the bottom of the barn door is uneven the “track” hardware I purchased to install on the floor and hold the door between its rollers was just not going to work. (It was too low on one side and two tall on the other side of the doorway.)

I ended up just buying these cute little rubber bumpers.

I stuck them to the bottom trim and boom – no more scraping.

Next I moved on to trimming out the inside of the doorway with 1x8s.

We picked them up at our local lumber yard. I cut the top board first, screwed it into place and then cut the two side boards to the measurement and screwed them into place as well.

Much better!

From there I filled the screw holes, sanded and painted it all out with several coats of bright white semi gloss paint.

With all of that done I am loving our hanging barn door a lot more now!

It was beautiful before but a door is first supposed to WORK as a door and now it does that much better than it ever has. Is it perfect at all? No of course not lol.

But this is a major improvement!