Making the Interior Doors

There are seventeen interior doors, including two closet doors built into the jog in the walls created by the front chimneys in the master bedroom and upstairs sitting room, and a small shoe closet  door  in the master bedroom. All these doors where made with tongue and groove construction as were the Indian shutters in the two matching living rooms. Unfortunately each door is slightly different so that they could not be mass produced.

The doors were constructed from sheets of maple 3" by 24". The door panel frames were cut from 1/8" stock to the correct width depending on whether it was a vertical or horizontal frame for the door panels. Then slots were cut 3/64+" wide and 1/16" deep in the door panel frames with one of the small circular cutters mounted in the milling machine. The door panels were made from 1/16" stock milled down to 3/64" to fit into the slots. All the door parts were sanded to a very smooth finish and glued together with Elmer's Carpenter's Glue. Then they were sanded again and given two primer coats of interior white paint and two finishing
high gloss coats of paint. Sanding was done between each coat and the paint was thinned down so that there were no out of scale brush strokes showing.

Click on photograph to enlarge

The secret to the construction of these doors were the hinges which were especially designed and made for this project. These hinges are shown in the photograph to the right. They have an extra flange to increase the gluing surface. Two sizes of hinges are shown. The larger size was used for the doors and the smaller size was used for the Indian shutters and the smaller panel doors created for the kitchen cabinets. They were also used for the doors of the linen closets that were built into the eaves of the second story bathroom.
The sketch (which is not in scale) shows how these hinges were mounted to maximize the gluing surface. The hinge flange on the door side was glued into place with five minute epoxy using an extra strip of wood that ran the entire length of the door to cover them and add strength. A slot just big enough to accommodate the hinge was drilled into the door frame as shown. This slot was filled with epoxy and the hinge slipped in and bent back as shown. The door frame was then glued into place in the door cutout, again using five minute epoxy.
The photograph on the right shows some of the left over door parts. The enlarged image shows the slots that are cut into the door panel frame. Also shown are the panels slipped into the grooves and partially assembled. Unlike the real doors these panels are not free floating panels to accommodate changes in humidity and temperature, but are glued into place using Elmer's Carpenter's Wood Glue.

The door including the side of the door frame with the hinge is given two primer coats and two finishing coats. Between each coat of paint the unit is sanded with 400 grit sandpaper.

The two sides of the door frame not attached to the door are glued into place with ordinary household Goop. Then the third side with the door is glued into place with five minute epoxy.

The door frame molding is not put into place until the wallpaper is mounted so that the molding can hold the wallpaper edges down firmly. The last step is to glue into place the door threshold which is stained, not painted.

Shown on the right are the finished doors minus the door knobs for the upstairs guest bedroom.

The kitchen doors are shown here before their knobs have been installed. You can see that they are much slimmer than doors in most dollhouses because these are in actual scale.
Here is a better view to illustrate the door thickness. This door opens into the second story sitting room.
This is a good view of the jog in the wall created by the front chimneys. It is easy to see how cleverly the builders made use of the jog in the wall, creating a closet to fill the space remaining. In the lower portion of the closet, closest to the exterior side wall on the right of the photograph, there are shelves for storage, making every square inch, no matter how short, a valuable space.


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