Make Your Own DIY Barn Door - Living Letter Home

Sharing our plans for our DIY barn door including a sneaky little trick we did to save floor space and add a lil’ somn’ somn’ extra! Come see!

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 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 a DIY barn door out there. Trust me. I’ve looked on Pinterest myself and they’re ERRYWHURR.

So, what’s different about our barn door? Well, just keep on readin’ fam.

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 and go pick it up! Saving you some time! Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya.

Steps to build your own DIY barn door

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 your lumber to size.

We also needed to trim one of the boards 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. 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 thing. Gotta make sure it’ll hold up under pressure.

Using giant clamps, slide in the top and bottom trim pieces 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?

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).

Next comes time for stain! I don’t know if I ever want to use a different stain ever. I promise we try. We have tried multiple stains on multiple different kinds of wood and we keep coming back to old faithful.

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.

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!