Fortunately I was able to reuse the old garage doors and frame by trimming them down and the space left is large enough to be able to get Jem’s Mini through so all we needed was a door to fill the gap that matched the original ones.  Ordinarily the cost of having a quality door made to match might have cost the same or more than simply buying some off the shelf doors and fitting them myself.  But my mate Ste’s dad (Graham) is a retired carpenter so I asked if he fancied making us a door. He came and had a look and said he’d be happy to do it and only wanted to charge for materials which was pretty cool! As he said, making a door was much better than staying in and doing the hoovering so he didn’t take too much persuading.

 

My ‘design consultant’ and I went through some ideas and eventually came up with a design for the new door.

 

 

This is what we decided would look right.

So Graham made some final measurements then went away and got started.

 

As we were now committed to keeping the old doors I figured I’d better give them some attention.

A good rub down…

 

…then some paint.

 

A few weeks later and the door was ready for collection so I borrowed the Landy again.

 

Time to get it painted.

 

Knot blocker on

 

 

Then primer then top coats

 

I ordered some big hinges and we hung the door. Nice simple job considering it’s a fairly large door.  Still needs glass.

 

Now the Mini could be moved we could finish painting that part of the garage.

 

And get the ceiling up.

 

Some fresh paint on one of the door bolts I reused.

 

I thought I might have ended up having to buy glass to glaze the old and new doors so it matched. But I was able to find a perfect match for the glass in the original doors which was a result. I ordered glass cut to size from www.forsythglazing.co.uk which arrived 5 weeks later.

Also found some wooden weather strip that perfectly matched the one on the old doors. Only problem was I couldn’t get it in a long enough length so had to buy 3 normal 900mm door size sections.

Painted ready for fitting.

 

Glass in and weather strips on. Doors done!

We’re really happy with the door. It just looks spot on with no sign it wasn’t made at the same time as the original doors.  This is how happy Jem was.

 

Finally a big part of the reason for doing this is finished. Now Jems Mini has it’s own house and can come and go whenever without there being a half dismantled car or kart or something of mine in the way.  Now we will actually use it cos it won’t be a hassle to get it out of the garage.