Moving right along with the work I’m doing in my office, next on the list is this closet:

The closet itself is unfinished and about a year ago I made those temporary shelves from OSB to “store” things on. But since then it’s just turned into a big, unsightly junk collector.

While I still need to install the trim around the door, I have to refinish the floor before I do that. So I decided just go ahead and build and install the door (again, “temporarily”) just to hide the mess. I’ll take it down again to sand the floor and trim the door opening.

Originally the door was going to be one that swings out, but given the small size of the room and the shelf on the wall with my monitors, I thought that a sliding one would work better. And it gave me a chance to design the track and rollers for it after the very popular barn door hardware that’s so trendy these days.

I only had a rough idea for how to make the parts and did most of the design on the fly. I started with the wheels and since this would be made from wood as much as possible, the axle that the wheel turns on would have to be fairly big to support the weight. For a bearing, I cut sleeves from a used caulking tube:

The plastic these are made from is slippery and my thinking is that it will reduce friction and wear over the life of the door. Gluing it into the wheel forces the wear on it over the full circumference, unlike a single spot if glued to the axle.

The rest of the parts were fairly straightforward and all made from Baltic birch plywood, although solid hardwood would work as well:

The track is just a piece of solid maple with a groove cut in it for the wheels to ride in:

And here’s how it looks:

I made a basic SketchUp model for the hardware and you can donload that here:

Barn Door Hardware

I made a video going through the build and installing of the door: