Creating a New Garden Door

Our old garden door has seen better days, but it served its purpose – it kept out the deer and other critters from entering our garden. But, it needed to be changed out to a newer looking entrance!

If you know me, I always put my heart into all of my projects, and this garden door was no different. We made a trip to Home Depot and got some nice flat pieces of wood, a box of screws, a can of mahogany gel stain, and some outdoor polyurethane. (I already had some leftover black netting to use in between the door slats, phew)

The first thing that I needed to change with our new door, was the width of the entrance to the garden. The old door was just exactly wide enough for the lawn mower to wiggle its way into the garden area, and that was a pain in my neck. The new door was definitely going to be wider to allow me to get the mower back there and the wheelbarrow too.

I decided to do a “slats” look for the door because I fell in love with this look, as it is all over Pinterest right now. If you look up any fences, garden fences, or privacy fences, the new look are the horizontal slats, instead of the regular vertical ones. Love it!

So, with that in mind, I went to work. Measure twice, cut once! This is definitely a good motto to remember when working with wood. I cut the strips of wood for the height of the door, then two for the top and bottom. Basically, at this point, you are just making a frame for your door, then I measured the door frame to see what size of slats I will need to cut to use across the actual door.

The photograph below shows the garden door before I attached it to my wood pole with hinges. Our new door is over 30+ inches in width, well wide enough to get the mower in the garden area now!

The photograph below is the new mahogany stained door with the black mesh attached to the inside of the door to keep the smaller critters out of the garden area. This look definitely matches the rest of the garden fence nicely.

Here is a photograph showing that I definitely used enough polyurethane on the door, eh! I took this pic right after it rained.

Now, I am working on building the little area next to the entrance so it matches the door. Two poles and more wood slats cut! Each slat has to be leveled too, so this process was never rushed. Each slat had to be screwed in place too.

The new addition next to the door is all stained and polyurethaned.

But, as you can see from the photograph below, I had to add the black mesh netting to this section to keep the small critters out! Now, everything matches just perfectly! Can you only imagine if I kept going all around the front of the garden area and did this? Boy, would that look so beautiful! (maybe next year!)

So, what do you think of our new garden door? What have you changed in your garden this year?