Screen Door out of Pallets

My house is small, and old (1928 California Bungalow), so my door dimensions are NOT going to match most of yours. I started by building a 30″ x 80″ door out of 1×4″ pallet boards, and then wanted to make it nicer looking than just a giant window screen, so added some sections with redwood pieces (also from pallets). I divided the door into an upper, small center, and lower section.

The upper section is covered with standard aluminum screening material to allow maximum air flow so that the dogs stay warm or cool, but the cats are kept out of the laundry room. The middle, narrow section is mostly for decorative purposes, other than I built a small access door to be able to get to the hook-and-eye latch we use to keep it closed. We couldn’t hang the door traditionally like you would on the front of your house – the doorway is so narrow that this would make it difficult to pass through with groceries and such, so we decided to mount it using one of those swinging barn door mechanisms. Plus, they’re just cool looking and sort of matches what we have on our old carriage house. The only problem with not having a traditional door knob/latch is that it can’t easily be opened from both sides, so if you came into the house on the “correct” side, you’d be able to unlock the door and let yourself into the remaining part of the house. If you came into the house from the other end, you’d have to go back out, all the way around, and then unlatch it. So, the little door allows us to open the latch from whichever side we come into the house from but still keeps the cats out of the laundry room.

The lower section is covered with a heavier, decorative aluminum mesh – sort of the style that’s used on security screen doors. This stuff has proven to be Mastiff-proof on our front door, so I went with it here too. The only thing we learned from using a swinging barn door hanging system is that the door can then be quickly pushed from the bottom and will sort of swing up and out like a garage door, so we added a clear down near our baseboards that we wedge the door behind before we latch it, and this solved the problem.

Beyond making the dimensions to match your door, there aren’t any plans that I used. I just kept going until I liked how it looked and aimed for sort of a hint of “mission-style” decoration to match some of our furniture. I also kept the components light, as it is just supposed to be a screen door.

All pallet wood – yes, even the redwood. We lucked out and got these weird redwood pallets recently, and they’ve been quite handy. :-D