DIY Barn Door + PDF Plans

Tell all ya friends and neighbors!

Build your own DIY barn door, including step by step PDF plans! It’s a great budget friendly project, even if you’re a beginner woodworker

I can’t believe we are almost there with this master bathroom refresh reveal! I feel like it’s been forever, but we’ve had lots of (fun) projects that I’ll be getting to share with you soon that have come up unexpectedly.

I’m sharing with you all today our DIY sliding barn door that is legit the easiest project even though it looks like it’s the most difficult. There are about 1.5 million tutorials for DIY rustic barn doors out there. Trust me. I’ve looked on Pinterest myself and they’re ERRYWHURR.

So, what’s different about our barn door? Come and see!

If PDF plans are easier for you to follow than a blog post, you’re in luck because I paid someone a lot smarter than me to make the PDF version of these DIY barn door plans.

They’re normally $12, but if you sign up for my email list, I’ll send you a code that makes them $4! Still will come in cheaper than buying the thing, I promise!

(Oh, and if you’re a salty white dude who thinks he’s owed something for free because I’m a woman, save yourself the email. Read the blog post then. I’m not changing my mind and if you don’t like it, you may show yourself out. Smooches!)

DIY Barn Door

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Supplies:

• 1x6x8 tongue and groove boards (x6)
• 1x4x10 boards (x2) for the trim around the edges
• 1x6x6 board (x1) for the piece in the middle
• Stain color of your choice (We chose our favorite, Minwax Early American)
• Wood glue
• Barn door handle
• Wall mounted barn door guide
• Barn door hardware
• Optional: Wood conditioner
• Optional: Full length mirror (like this one we got at Target – We got one in pink, but it’s no longer available)
• Optional: Command strips if you’re going to hang a mirror like we did

The reason I link to wood is because if you’re anything like me, sometimes the lumber aisle can be intimidating. So, by linking them, my hopes is that you can just place an order online at Home Depot or Lowes and go pick it up! Saving you some time! Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya.

Steps to building a barn door for yourself:

First, you’ll want to measure your own width of your door casing and height because all your measurements will change depending on that.

For reference, our door is 29 3/4″ x 84 1/4″.

Cut the boards to size.

We also needed to trim one of the boards that would be used for the sides of the door so that it would be the right width for our casing so here we used THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS TABLE SAW.

One of these days, we’ll have the money to get one that couldn’t so easily cut a limb off.

Next, lock in your pieces of wood using the tongue and grooves. We also added a bit of wood glue in the grooves so that we could have a little bit of extra support.

Not like we’re going to be swinging or hanging on this thing, but still.

Lay your trim pieces on the left and right sides and use a nail gun to nail them on.

You can see here this is the width of the barn door including the trim. It’s not thick at all so it’s also a space saver.

Don’t forget to use a small wild haired boy to test the weight limits of this budget friendly DIY project. Gotta make sure it’ll hold up under pressure.

Using giant clamps, slide in the trim pieces at both the top and the bottom of the door and nail them into place.

Measure your door from inside top trim to inside bottom trim to find the middle.

This is where you will put your 1×6 in the middle of your barn door.

Next, put wood glue on your piece of 1×6 and put in place.

Sanding and staining your DIY barn door

You’ll want to make sure you give your door a good once over with a power sander. You could totally do this by hand but let’s be real, why would anyone wanna do that if you ain’t gotta?

If you haven’t noticed, we have 90% Ryobi tools and for the most part, they’re great quality. I would say the Ryobi power sander is a great tool for the price – it’s under $50!

This next step is optional, but we always like to put wood conditioner on our projects (like our DIY farmhouse table, our open shelving in our kitchen and our guest bathroom shelves).

It seems to let the stain soak in better and more evenly – whether you’re using pine boards or oak or whatever wood you prefer!

Next comes time for stain! I don’t know if I ever want to use a different stain ever. I promise we’ve tried.

We have tried multiple stains on multiple different kinds of wood and we keep coming back to old faithful which is Minwax Early American.

Adding A Mirror To Our Barn Door

We had a full length mirror leaning up against our wall, but a certain one year old got buck one time and knocked it over and broke it.

So, we needed another solution. One that allowed us to have a full length mirror but not have it on the floor.

This barn door is super easy to install with the barn door hardware we got so if you’re wanting to add a full length mirror like we did, add command strips on both sides of the mirror as well as the top and bottom.

Then make sure you’re insanely happy and hang that bad boy.

Is it weird that my favorite part about doing this DIY barn door with tongue and groove is how the back side looks beadboard?? I honestly didn’t know this is what it would look like but it does and I COULD NOT love it more!! It’s absolutely perfect!

Open and closed, I love it all!

Oh, just ignore the fact that our bedroom currently doesn’t have floors. More on that later 😉