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Making Composite Oak Triple Glazed French Doors

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We wanted to loose the cold draughty garage door, and replace it with some lovely oak double doors that would let in lots of daylight, but still be warm and energy efficient.

We don't own much big woodworking machinery and the basic design was conceived so that it would be possible to make these doors possessing only fairly simple tools, whilst still producing decent glue joints. By obtaining pre-planed and dimensioned wood from a local sawmill, I figured I should be able to laminate together some fine joinery and make some good triple glazed oak doors.

These are designed to be super insulative: they have a composite cork construction, well specified triple glazed units, and a double weatherseal round the edges.

Here are the results. Any questions just ask.

7 comments

Oct 20, 2011. 3:02 PMDIYDragon says:

Awesome! I want to do exactly this with my garage. I want to turn it into a sort of game room office area instead of a collecting junk area. : )

Oct 20, 2011. 3:15 PM

bongodrummer (author) says:

Hehe, Thanks. If you make something similar let us know how it goes! ;)

Feb 17, 2011. 12:45 PMvincent7520 says:

impressive !

Aug 19, 2010. 2:20 PM

bongodrummer (author) says:

If there is interest, there is a load more info on this project that I have just put on the FloweringElbow site.

Aug 18, 2010. 8:31 PM

mikeasaurus says:

A professional looking job! Triple glazing has an excellent R value and will really help keep that heat in/cold out. In addition to fine workmanship, did you have to add thermal breaks anywhere else, or was this door the only culprit?

Aug 19, 2010. 12:47 AM

bongodrummer (author) says:

Hi mikeasaurus, Thanks for the reply. That garage door certainly was not the only culprit. Making the house energy efficient has been an on going mission since we moved in. We started with the usual things, like adding to the loft insulation and cavity wall insulation. Some of the houses windows were double glazed in UPVC frames when we moved in, some were single glazing in wood. We took out the single glazing, expanded the rebates in the wooden frames and added the best double glazing that would fit there. So the rest of the house is only double glazed (and some of that is quite poor double glazing)... There are still some bad air leaks about the place, but I have sorted most of them. I am leaving these for now until I sort out some full on mechanical heat recovery ventilation ;)