In this blog post, I will describe the exact steps we took to make our first internal door. This is a very basic design with a solid wood frame and plywood outer cover. The door we made is very thick because it needed to block noise from our boiler, but I will also explain how to make the same door at a thinner, more common thickness.
THE PLAN
This door was built to separate the boiler cupboard from the rest of our bedroom. Most of the time it’s inaccessible as my desk stands in front of it. This meant the door didn’t have to be anything fancy but just something that would look fresh and fit in with the rest of the bedroom. The entrance to the cupboard is also very tall, so buying a ready-made door wasn’t an option.
Because the boiler is quite noisy, I wanted a door that would be relatively soundproof. For this reason, I thought having two layers of plywood with space in between would work better than a solid plywood door. The door design features a solid wooden frame covered with two layers of plywood on either side. I also thought some thin plywood strips would make a nice decorative frame.
The plan for the door is as follows:
MATERIALS & TOOLS REQUIRED
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Materials
Note that sizes will vary depending on the size of your door.
Tools
- Drill with relevant screw and drill bits
- Saw – hand saw is fine if you can get your ply cut to size in the store. Otherwise, I would recommend an electric saw with a track.
- Hammer
- Sanding block/ sander
- Pencil
- Ruler
- Measuring tape
- Paintbrush
- Chisel – for installing the hinges
STEP 1: BUILD THE INTERNAL DOOR FRAME
Build the frame
As a first step, we built the internal door frame. We cut two identical long strips, which would be as high as our door needed to be, and four shorter strips to sit in between. If you have a pocket hole jig, you can use that to attach the shorter pieces of wood to the longer ones from the inside of the frame.
We don’t have one, so we cut some wood blocks and used those to screw the frame together.
Another method to attach everything is to screw it from the outside. This will mean that you have to fill over the screws before painting later to hide them.
Attach an extra piece of wood for handle placement later
After we built the frame, we measured roughly where we would put the door handle and latch and screwed another piece of wood there. This was required because we were going to put a regular door handle on which meant we needed to drill through the door quite far off the edge.
Quick tip 1
We used 44mm thick and wide wood for the frame because we wanted a very thick door. With x3 layers of 5mm ply, the final door becomes 59mm. Use thinner wood for the frame if you want a thinner, more traditional door.
STEP 2: CUT AND ATTACH THE PLYWOOD FRONT AND BACK
We didn’t get our plywood sheet precut to the exact size at the store, but we did get it cut in half because our total door width was less than half of a plywood sheet. To finish the job, we placed the sheet down and put the door frame on top of it. We traced the frame on the sheet, removed it, and cut the sheet where marked.
We nailed it to the frame and did the same thing on the other side of the door. Note that when we nailed it, we marked where the shorter internal pieces of wood were so we could nail the sheets there too.
Quick tip 2
We didn’t glue the plywood sheets to the frame but I did include wood glue on the materials list as I think it would have held everything better if glued. I had to keep putting extra pins in every so often because I could see a bit of space between the frame and plywood, which wouldn’t have been an issue if we had glued it.
STEP 3: ATTACH DECORATIVE PLYWOOD STRIPS
The decorative plywood strips were cut down to 10cm in width for us at the store. This made it easy to measure them to length, cut them, and nail them on. I highly recommend that you glue them on as well as nail them. After this, the actual build part of the door was finished!
STEP 4: FINISH THE DOOR
To finish the door, we hung it using regular door hinges. Then, we attached a common type of door handle—a tubular latch handle. As a final step, I sanded the door to smooth any imperfections and painted it to match the rest of the room. It was so quick and simple to build that I’m surprised how good it looks!
