$100 Quarter Sawn Oak Front Door

I have been meaning to do a post about our front door for a while. The door has been a project I have been working on for several months on and off. For the house addition we decided to site-build all of the doors. This includes the 12 interior doors. These are more akin to furniture with the amount of finish work that has gone into them.

The door is quite large but the scale is perfect for our porch. It measures in at 4 feet x 8 feet, not including the casing or side lights and is made entirely out of quarter sawn oak that we cut on site. The door is so heavy that I used 5 hinges to hang it. For more about the quarter sawing you can check out a previous post.

When you go into any big box store you can order up the large "custom" entry doors. They come in a variety of woods and wood looking fiberglass. They can run upwards of $5,000 for a fully custom door. Our only expense was some custom insulated glass panels from Clear Vue Glass in Durham and the finish. Okay ... while the door itself may have only cost under $100, my overall investment (including the shop, sawmill, tractor etc) raises the cost of the door.

The following picture provides a good example of the quarter sawn oak that we were getting out of our logs. It is fairly labor intensive, but the process gives you a great grain pattern and a stable product. The rails and stiles are actually laminated, or made up of two 3/4 inch boards glued together. This results in less warpage and allows you to use regular 4/4 stock instead of starting out with 8/4 stock. We used the standard dark stain formula that I came up with several years ago after doing a lot of sampling of different stain mixtures. It is the same stain that we are using on the interior trim and some furniture.

The interior is still lacking its final trim. The ultimate plans are to add some stained glass in the top window and the side lights, but that will have to wait until we get the stained glass materials out. You can see an amber stained glass fixture above the door. As it works out, and one could even say as planned, it is perfectly framed in by the window in the door as you walk up to the house.

With much of the trim and wood work in the house I have tried to keep true to the wood that we have. While much of the quarter sawn boards are clear of knots, some are not. Instead of being overly selective with the boards, I routed out the few knots and placed some dutchmen so the door looks like it has been there for 100 years and has had some repairs. It is a what I call "perfectly imperfect". Gustav Stickley would have been proud.

Quarter Sawn Oak Trim

The interior of our large addition to our house is going to be a little different than the "forest" look that we have in the timber frame current portion of the house. What I mean is that there will be less wood and less Southern Yellow Pine. I said the "forest look" because Stephanie sometimes comments on the over abundance of wood with all the rough cut timbers, pine flooring, trim, pine ceiling etc. It could all be complete if we installed a wood toilet seat and one of those high end wood bath tubs ;)

So we are going for a 1910 Craftsman large bungalow interior look on the addition with more drywall but plenty of trim. If one is to execute this properly you need a lot of Quarter Sawn Oak. We are doing this the traditional way and using oak in the formal or public rooms (entry, living room and family room) and then clear pine in the bedrooms etc. It is all coming from trees milled on site. The pine is from the property and the oak is a mix of trees I cut and some that Mr. M our excavator dropped off for us a while back.

The oak is mainly Red Oak and diameters randing from 24 to 48 inch. As you can imagine this can pose a problem trying to saw up a 48 inch diameter log. This is where the quarter sawing process comes into play. First I need to quarter the log into 4 equal sections and this is done using a chain saw on the large logs. This itself can take and hour or more to rip a large logs lengthwise. Once a section is on the mill there are various ways to skin a cat or cut the quarter section. The basic idea is to have the saw blade perpendicular to the rings in the section of log, giving vertical straight grain boards. I found this great example of quarter sawn oak (to the right) at the Tree Frog Furniture blog. The ultimate goal is to end up with a bunch of boards that have been cut with the grain straight and medullary rays exposed (see the example below). These are basically the tubes that go from ring to ring in the tree. It is one of those things that when you see it you know what I am talking about. I was afflicted with an obsession about quarter sawn oak about 12 -15 years ago when I first started making Mission furniture during graduate school. It has progressed to the point where whenever Stephanie and I would move to a new town I would seek out the local small town sawyer and try and get all the quarter sawn material they had. Id even pay for the material in advance. Then it progressed to looking for the random quarter sawn oak boards in strip flooring when walking through a room or the trim in all the auditoriums that I sit in listening to endless talks.
The sawing is all done on our Lumbermate 2000 sawmill, which has paid for itself many times over. This is a completely manual mill so it requires a little work to move the logs around but for the amount I use it, it gets the job done. Instead of considering it a stand alone saw mill I see it as part of my wood shop, especially since it is permanently located at the back end of the shop. Soon it will even get some work as I cut some veneer for the interior and exterior doors I am working on for the house.The oak is stacked and stickered right off the mill and once there is a pile that is 1000 to 1200 board feet (12"X12"X1") it is placed in the solar kiln for 5-6 weeks of drying. This brings the moisture level of the wood down to 6-8% and it is ready for use.
Finally, I have the finished product which is a whack (a technical term for a lot) of quarter sawn dry boards that I can plane, edge, stain, seal and use to finish all the trim work and other furniture projects that have been started but not completed.