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window in a closet door
Saturday, December 27 2008
Finally, a day with no holiday parties hanging as ominously past the afternoon as the premature winter sundown! I spent much of it furthering the excavation of the greenhouse's door well. The warming from the recent cold spell had been enough to further soften the frozen ground, though in some places I found myself undermining the frozen parts in hopes that exposing it to air from below as well as above would ease its excavation at some point in the near future.
At some point I selected a door for the greenhouse from among our collection of closet doors. (Soon after we'd moved into this house, Gretchen removed many of the closet doors so as to open the closet space into their adjacent rooms.) The only door that would fit was one 30 inches wide that one of the former residents had put his fist half-way through. (I assume this resident was the one who had a drum kit in the attic space that we later converted into our bedroom; teenage angst explains both.) My plan for this door was to somehow mount a window inside of it to further increase the amount of glazing. It turned out that I had a perfect double-glazed unit I'd salvaged along Dug Hill Road. It measured over five square feet and its seals weren't even blown.
Somehow, though, I had to mount it into a closet door, a solid slab of not very much. After some measuring, I clamped on a straight edge (my first use of this technique, which I'd just learned from someone at the Christmas party at the farm animal sanctuary) and used my power saw to cut into the door's top layer. Removing this, I found an array of conventional cardboard forming a structural lattice inside. This was easily broken away, and the other side was easily cut out as well. There was a bit of particleboard intruding from the door's handle area, but I was able to chisel it out of the way. It didn't turn out to be all that hard to make a space for the window unit, which I set in place in a glurp of spray foam and Gorilla Glue. Since the whole thing isn't made out of much more than cardboard, I'll have to seal it up in polyurethane or something, but for the time being this modified closet door has turned out much better than I would have expected.
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