I think we take doors for granted. We use them everyday. They protect us. They provide privacy. They both shut things out, yet open up new spaces and opportunity. There are life expressions analogizing doors: “when one door shuts, another opens,” “just gotta get your foot in the door,” etc.

I’m fascinated by doors, especially old ones. Where they came from, what they were used for, what they must’ve “seen.” If walls could talk, right?

Our style could best be described as industrial. We like modern and vintage, but industrial is the common thread.

For a couple years starting in 2018, we went on a door kick. We traveled around the Midwest collecting industrial doors salvaged from buildings marked for destruction in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

Each door we acquired started giving us ideas about where it could go, what rooms it would open up, what new life it could have. We feel that part of homesteading is giving things new life.

We started storing these doors with the intention of sprucing them up and using them as interior doors in our modern homestead home. They started shaping the design for the house, each one becoming a focal point, a story. In a way, our home will be an art gallery of doors.

One may be starting to wonder why the tops of these doors aren’t level. They’re industrial fire doors. They’re sliding barn doors, designed before barn-style doors were on trend. They roll along an angled track with a counterweight hanging by a sash chain and/or cord over a pulley.

If a fire occurred, the chain or cord would burn and break, the weight would fall, the door would roll downhill along its track to shut off the opening. How insanely cool is that?! The fire inspector would check the integrity of the sash cord and chain, and he/she would also make sure doors weren’t propped open, unable to close in the event of a fire.

These doors are tin-clad wood, and they weigh several hundred pounds each. On one side, they have an Underwriter’s Laboratory “UL” label, and on the other side, they have a peep-hole, of sorts, in the tin so the quality of the wood inside can be evaluated.

The engineering and ingenuity still amazes me. We’re planning to use the doors as originally designed, counterweights and all.

We have one fire door that swings closed in a similar fashion by a weight suspended through a series of pulleys. We’ll see if we can get that one to work as intended too.

We have other so-called “normal” doors that we’ll either pocket or convert to barn-style sliders.

We found the perfect doors for the master suite too…who wouldn’t want shipping container French doors?

We’ll save quite a few more door surprises for later, but we’ll be sure to share our journey of getting them ready for their new lives on our modern homestead.