My Accidental Barn Door Style Sliding Doors

I had decided to sand back my sliding french doors to their original wood and clear coat them to match my other french doors. Because I sanded them while they were still hanging, a lot of sawdust got up in the runners and made the doors hard to slide. The only way to fix this was to remove the wooden pelmet.

Here is how my doors looked at Christmas. See the big wooden pelmet.

So after the pelmet came off, I was actually able to take the doors down and outside to finish sanding. My new DeWalt Vac is great for picking up a lot of dust indoors, but there is always a fine layer so it was great that I could take them outside. This was advantage number one.

Advantage number two was I could see how our doors were hung. This gave me the idea of turning them into a barn door style. I priced barn door hardware and it was getting pricey. Then I had an idea. I took down all the brackets on one side, took them outside, cleaned them thoroughly, then applied flat black spray paint.

I then gave the wall backboard a few coats of white paint. 

When everything was all dry, I put them all back together and presto! Barn style doors. At no cost!

Okay, there was a small cost. Can't have barn doors without barn door handles!

The last step was applying two coats of clear varnish to the doors.

Now tell me, who doesn't love how barn doors look.  And gone is that big old pelmet. Well, to the garage anyway. Hubby is sure I will change my mind and want to put it back up some time in the future.

For the time being I'm pretty happy with how the doors look.

:) Julie