The doors now open on front-facing hinges, mounted to a new wooden jamb.
photos by Marc LaBossiere / Winnipeg Free Press
This old steel shed was fitted with custom-built outward opening doors, which replaced the failing steel sliders.
While growing up in Norwood, our home was one of the few on the block without a garage, which in retrospect was great, because this meant we had a huge backyard.
That said, there was no place to store the lawn mower, gardening tools, and bicycles, so we had a shed. For years, that small, green and white metal shed became our outdoor yard locker. It served its purpose, but the crude sliding doors were difficult to open and close.
This past spring on a jobsite the client asked if it was possible to fix the doors on his backyard shed. In a flash of nostalgia my mind immediately transported to the shed from my childhood. At first glance this one appeared to be in pretty good shape — but just as my family had laboured with the sliding doors of our mint-green shed, the condition of the doors on this shed were actually even worse — they could no longer open at all, and were well beyond repair.
The client asked if it was possible to remove the existing doors and mount two new doors that opened outward? Of course anything is possible with proper planning and a sound design.
A few weeks later, during a brief pause at another jobsite location, a quick trip to the local McMunn & Yates was made to pick up a few 2x6 pressure-treated boards, a sheet of half-inch treated plywood, two sets of hinges, handles, and a latch to lock the shed when the job was done.
Once the old steel doors were completely removed, the shed opening was fitted with a new 2x6 jamb, which was fastened to the shed using 1.5-inch ceramic screws installed from within the shed through predrilled holes along the perimeter of the shed opening. The two sets of front-facing hinges were then positioned and affixed at the top and bottom of each side of the new jamb. With the jamb secured and hinges in place, the two new wooden doors were constructed.
Traditionally, each of these doors would be prebuilt and hung. In this instance, because the doors would be introduced onto an existing shed that over time, has likely shifted and slanted slightly here and there, the two outer boards of the door panel frames were first mounted to the hinges on either side, and each door was then constructed in place to ensure the door sizes meet the size and idiosyncrasies of the opening. The two main two panels were cut to slightly smaller size, and affixed to the pre-hung outer door panel frame. The remaining panel frames were built one at a time, cutting the lengths to meet the existing widths and heights that best suit the opening. With the door panels completed, the handles were mounted on each door, and the latch is set just below the handles where both doors meet.
Repurposing and recycling is always a good call when possible. Completely replacing the shed may have been an option, but luckily, there was a cost-effective alternative that made this old steel shed 100 per cent functional again.
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