Functional Barn Door Sliders

Two large barn door sliders were in bad shape. Each slid on separate tracks so passed each other when one door was completely open. The arrangement allowed only one door to be open at a time. The problems were numerous: broken boards, many patches adding considerable weight, tracks pulled from their anchors, rollers would not slide in the tracks or even stay in the tracks. The owner thought the doors were continually being beat up when storms blew. The doors would blow out at the bottom and a big one like Tropical Storm Irene probably swung them out so far as to bend the bolts that carried the doors.

Before I came up with a solution, I removed the patches that added extra weight to the doors, rollers and tracks. Then I replaced the broken boards so the doors were semi-straight. The top horizontal members where the rollers attached were broken so the rollers had to be removed and reattached after the new boards were in place. I reshaped the bent tracks and re-anchored them with bigger bolts that attached to studs instead of just the siding. Finally I had them sliding so it was time to address the way they swung out at the bottom when the wind blew.

First I built a receiver slot for the outer edges of both doors to fit into when closed. The inner edges of the doors could still blow outward which twisted the doors. The problem was to make an attachment method that would anchor the inner edges of the doors to the building yet allow the doors to pass by each other when not anchored. To accomplish this I added a narrow board to the inner end of each door with three strap hinges. These hinges allowed the boards to be either in the same plane as the doors or to be turned 90 degrees. At this angle, hasps at the bottom served to anchor the new hinged boards to the short wall between the doors. Small carabiners locked the hasps to the barn so they could’t bang in the wind. Problem solved. Remove the right hasp and straighten the narrow board to plane with the door and it would slide outside of the left door. To open the left (inner) door, both hasps need to be released and both narrow boards positioned to plane with the doors and then it would slide behind the right door.

In a later phase of the project two stall doors were built on the windward end of the barn to close openings that funneled wind into the barn and pushed on the sliding doors. Also numerous broken siding boards were replaced to further reduce the wind’s effect on the doors.