Nov 10, 2017 4 min read

Type “barn doors” into Google or Pinterest and you’ll see hundreds of them, doors that look like they were pulled from a horse stable, spiffed up, and hung inside houses. Most hang from wheels on black iron tracks. Some come in pairs, and some are painted bright colors. The one that inspired me had a rustic dried wreath on it. As I too often do when I get inspired, I took it to the farmer.

“Do you think we could hang a barn door?”

“Why do you need a barn door,” he said, “and what do you mean by ‘we’?”

We first saw a decorative barn door while touring vacation homes. The incongruity of it struck me as strange and cool and probably impossible to achieve. Even if you were to find a barn door that didn’t smell like a barn, where would you find that track thing to hang it? And how difficult would it be to install?

Those questions did not deter me. This new, smallish house I’m in has an open doorway between the main living space and the den, and that’s where the barn door should go. It’s a rustic setting, with woods all around and a large family of deer that come right up to the deck.

The farmer, perhaps rightfully seeing this inspiration of mine as yet another project for him, was skeptical. What if this barn door thing is a fad, a pricey and labor-intensive task that will soon go the way of the avocado refrigerator?

Ah, the avocado refrigerator. I grew up in a modern house that had a kitchen that never saw a fresh avocado but had the color everywhere. The house also had some of the other trends of the 1970s, including a paneled game room and one of those lamps with a huge, bulbous shade suspended from a high arching arm. Also, my sister had black, white and pink foiled wallpaper in her bedroom. We had the coolest house of anyone I knew.

Those trends have been replaced by others: wallpaper borders, popcorn ceilings, dried hydrangea arrangements, chintz, wicker, sponge painting and ferns, ferns everywhere.

I bought into three of the above fads, all brought into my homes with the same creative fervor that was now fueling my need for that barn door.

It turns out you can buy them at home stores, and from a dozen online places. The hardware costs more than the doors do.

Hanging ours would require special wooden support to fortify the top of the doorway.

The farmer installed our barn door over the course of a few weekends. More than anyone I’ve ever known, he has a grasp of the physical world that allows him to find a way around obstacles. Turns out that doorway was not straight, but you wouldn’t know it looking at the door hanging there.

I’m thinking about putting an autumn wreath on it. The farmer hates wreaths on doors, mostly because he is very tall and the wreaths tend to attack his head when he walks through. But I think he likes the door: he can close off his den from the rest of the house when he’s in there watching football or whatever.

I love the barn door. It goes with the overall rustic feel of this house in the woods. I do worry, though, that one day I will look at it and decide its time has passed. Ferns are easy to get rid of, and wallpaper can be removed.

But a barn door hanging from expensive hardware in a doorway adapted to hold it? That might be forever.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.