Camping In - Part IV - The Door in the Window!

I have always supposed the the best thing about doing regular progress posts and mentioning all sorts of ideas is that you get to do this:

Remember this? (http://maxomoxx.blogspot.com/2014/02/transom-clerestory-skylight-window.html)

And this?

Well, guess what!

B totally got what I had in mind.  And he is a regular whiz with power tools and measuring things.  So, on our last afternoon up at the house, he hauled a couple saw horses out into the side yard and made a workbench with some leftover plywood from the storage area wall he had re-covered earlier that day and he got to work on making that old door fit the window hole.

First, we removed all manner of nails and screws and weird old metal hardware, including, inter alia, doorknob escutcheons, sliding lock mechanisms, steel plates along the edges, hinges, curtain hooks, and more.

Then we chopped the ends off.  To be fair, what happened was that B did all the measurements and I helped clamp the saw guide to the door and then I did the sawing.  It wasn't very fair of me to make him do the boring stuff and then let me do the fun sawing bit, but I can be a petulant little turd and I wanted to saw my own door.  Sorry B.

Here is where a big escutcheon covered a void in the door.  When I took off the escutcheon, a heap of old gum wrappers and cigarette butts and other forty year-old awfulness fell out of the door.  It seems folks had been stuffing their little tiny garbage into the keyhole for decades.

As I was sawing the long edge of the door, every so often, the saw would slow and sparks would fly as I cut through a nail or screw. 

At a certain point, I bored of helping and went off to walk in my woods while B kept at it, taking careful measurements and trimming the size down to just right.

And when I got back from my walk, he was still at it!!  That is the full moon, FYI.

Here are the door trimmings.

AND!!!  Here is the window, mocked up into the rough opening.  Obviously the sheet rock needs to be trimmed back to the framing and the door needs to be sanded a little and repainted, but this is the general idea.  I can already see RE agents taking pix of this for their listings.  It's gonna be an exciting little detail to point out - reclaimed door as a window!!

I am pretty darn happy with how it looks - and how I am now confident it is going to look when finished.

Hooray for B!!!