The Ancient Basement

We are starting the process of finishing out our basement to give us more entertaining space and space that is easily accessible for our parents because there aren’t any stairs. We are going for a 1930’s English Pub look. The first thing we did was find some really cool antique doors in Toledo, OH. We drove up there in March, I think, to pick them up. The couple that we bought them from had restored an 1800’s house and they had collected a lot of stuff to use in it including a bunch of doors that they didn’t end up using and had held on to for 40 years or more.

These doors are unlike anything I have seen. They are two vertical panels and they don’t have a drop of glue in them. They have REALLY long mortise and tenon joints that are pegged together. The guy we bought them from was told when he bought them originally, that they probably date from the 1840’s or so. The style wasn’t popular for long. You can also tell that they are really old by the way that the door knob mechanism must have worked–it must have been external, not internal like modern doors. While we were there (and had a trailer with lots of room in it), we looked around his garage, wood shop, and other building at some more stuff. We bought the 7 vertical panel doors on eBay and we picked up 5 more plus some hardware and an industrial shaper while we were there.

I know that seems like a LOT of doors for a basement, but I will explain why we need so many. We built a closet at the bottom of the stairs to store all the canning supplies, and all the home canned stuff, plus the little deep freeze, and to hide the electrical panel. That took three doors.

We also needed doors for what will be a closet under the stairs and the store room.

These are the original exterior doors from the 1800’s farm house that they replaced with something else. We will frost the glass on these so you can’t see in. We are just going to clean these doors, because we don’t want them to look new. These two doors are the only ones that came with door jambs. My husband had to build the ones for the closet, and will have to build jambs for all the rest as well.

So that takes care of 5 doors. How are we going to use the rest of the doors? There are two doors that are not quite 6′ tall. We are guessing that those were closet doors, and that is what we are going to use them for. We have a place on one side of the wood stove where the utilities that go down to the dock come through the wall that we need to maintain access to, so we are building a closet to hide them. Since we want that to look intentional, we are building another closet on the other side of the wood stove.

My husband will use the other exterior door that we bought for his office. The glass is broken, so he wants to replace the glass with something that obscures the view–like ribbed glass. We need two doors for the bathroom–one for the closet to hide the HVAC unit, and the other for the entrance. We may build a toilet room in that bathroom, which would use another door.

So that leaves 1 or 2 of the doors that we bought in Toledo. We also have 3 doors that we picked up along the way. 2 are five panel doors that we will tip on their sides and use to clad the outside of the bar in the kitchenette/bar. So as of right now, we have 2 or 3 doors that we don’t have specific plans for. It seems amazing to us that the basement is going to use that many doors.

So stay tuned to see the rest of the project.