08/30/2026
Gavin and his family live in Rockport, MA and the downstairs finished area has a bedroom that needed an ART barn door.
Soufflés was a popular coffee kitchen spot located at 14 Market Square, Newburyport which closed some years ago.
Tim Karatzas, owner of Karatzas Contracting LLC is a long-time friend whose business located in our same warehouse space in Amesbury, and he and his crew did demo and rebuild of the space. Beaman Cole, builder crew member, suggested The Barndoorist could make something neat out of part of the old countertop from this establishment. The giant long and heavy slab of randomly raised Douglass Fir wood blocks was stored in our workshop for future use!
We crafted heavy-duty low-profile, top-mounted wheels fastened to a metal plate partly embedded into the build, which now got even heavier and thicker when we adhered tongue and groove boards to the other side. Tests proved that a sturdy angle iron rail would be required to hold this up for all time. Once a heavy sliding door is hung, it rolls with ease, but everything had to be just so. The brackets mounted to the header above Gavin’s room entryway have hidden metal stanchions behind them (and a broken drill bit lol) that transfer the force against a metal flinch plate behind the painted drywall for the main header beam over the opening.
We used our hidden base guide and added “side boards” to complete the door installation after rolling it into the room on temporary casters. To get this off the trailer and into the back yard bulkhead entryway, Matthew C. Tibert of M.C. Tibert Construction from Gloucester and his crew who have been working on renovating the upstairs helped move this 300+ Lbs beast across the lawn and into the room!
Am 8x8 raised block cut off section we also gave to Gavin could become a neat wall hanging or even a 3-D chess board!
The whole project took about 10 hours to build and install, and as it turns out, if you were to walk from the site which is now called The Plume Café - NBPT coffee shop to Rockport, that’s about how long it would take.
plumcafe