Project Doorway

The door frame as it stand now...

I've spent the last two days working out how to frame the door on the west wall. I habitually rubber-neck old houses for details and have spent a bunch of time thinking about the possibilities, but when the time came hadn't actually worked out a definite design. In retrospect it would have been profitable to spend some time drawing before launching into actually building the details. With most of the details on the house I've felt fairly confident and almost casual about what direction to go--I've trusted my take and generally just moved ahead and it's worked well. This door project proved to be a different story.

Right off the bat I could tell I didn't really have a sense of direction. I forged ahead anyways and just started putting pieces up, taking them down, cutting them to different lengths or widths in an attempt to sort of collage together a direction.

Some scholars claim that hot-glue was used periodically by the Greeks when constructing temples

I realized in doing this I was squandering fairly good material that I might not actually use in the final product, so instead of cutting up perfectly good wood I started hot-gluing scraps together to lengthen a piece I cut too short, or gluing on a little piece to see how it looked. I spent may hours yesterday doing this and at some point lit upon the idea that the architrave-frieze section could have a dentil molding that referenced the roof lookouts. (See the drawing below to clarify what these names refer to). This got my sense of direction going a bit and by the end of the day on Sunday I felt like I was at least moving towards a solution, but knew also that it wasn't quite right. This was more or less where I ended up yesterday:

Results of day one

Today I went back at it and again spent considerable amounts of time working on this little project. At some point I stepped into the yurt and typed "Greek revival doorway" into Google and checked out what came up. The following drawing caught my eye and helped me move forward a bit. I've added the names of the various parts to help clarify what's what.



When I saw this drawing it helped me realize that rather then adding the little horizontal detail at the top of the "columns" (the vertical pieces on either side of the door) I needed to add a cornice-like section to lift the whole thing up a bit from the top of the door.
That got me here:


At this point I felt like like I was on the right track and so started to actually build and install the
finished product. By the end of the day I had the project all up and complete and decided to let it sit for a little while (see picture at top). The top pieces are screwed in, so I can take them out and mess with it all a bit more if need be.

Though I love this sort of work, this whole thing just didn't come easy.