Tardis Bedroom door

[chairleg]

Tardis Door Project July 2012

This project came about due to Damian's new love and passion for Dr
Who (the British TV series).  He has watched just about every episode
of Dr Who (starting with the 9th Doctor) in about 2 months.  He has
been nonstop on making sure he knew what was going on, the aliens, the
companions and of course the Tardis.  With all of this and the fact of
all this, we thought it would be great to start something special for
him and so we decided to turn his bedroom door into the Tardis!


Starting out we decided that the door hanging due to having the
beveled areas would not make for a good solid Tardis door and so we
went to the hardware store and picked up a just plain interior door.
The bad part with this is, well the door was 30" and the door frame
was only 29 and ¾ of an inch.  This meant bad news for me, on top of
having to drill holes for the door knob and latch I was now going to
have to sand/shave off that extra ¼ inch of the door.



After the fun of that and checking to make sure it worked it was time
to get started on the fun part of measuring the door to see how
everything is going to be placed.  Luckily I found the actual Tardis
plans online and kind of just based my door off of the dimensions of
theirs.  After getting that along with the sign typed up and laminated
sign for the left side of the door, it was time to go get wood and
make the frames.


I decided to go with ¼ inch plywood to frame things out and I could
easily double it up for certain areas like the center of the door and
police box sign. I will need two pieces cut 2" x 60" and one piece cut
to 5" x 60" to make the frames.  I will need 4 pieces cut to 3" x and
then 4 cut to 3" x to finish out the frames, I will need 2 pieces cut
to 3" x 29 ½ "to make the top and bottom of the frame.  Next I cut a
piece that was 1" x 60" to make the center of the door; this will help
give the look of two doors on top of just the single door.


After I finished the framed out parts it was time to start on the
police box sign.  I decided I would make this roughly an inch high to
make it stand out over the door frame.  My measurements put the box at
roughly 5.5" by the 29 and ½ "to leave room for the door to actually
close.  I cut the wood, sanded it down and painted it black.  After
everything I used a stencil that was found at a local hobby store to
place the letters out and paint them white.


Now I had to find out how I was going to make the base.  I figured
that I will need to splint the last 10" in half so that I can have a
stair and a base.  After talking it over and looking at things I
decided to make the first stair roughly half an inch high while the
second stair was a full inch to give the impression of depth and
sturdiness of the base.

Time to paint!!  We went ahead and just painted the back of the door
white to make it closer to the shows inside.  Damian picked blue as
high Tardis door color.  So after attaching all the wood with wood
glue and tack nails, it was time to paint the door.  We went ahead and
painted the windows white and taping them off so that we wouldn't have
to try and cover the blue. After the blue was dry we took off the tape
for the windows, added the window panes, painted the correct windows
yellow and left the others white (to make it look like the lights were
on).  After we were finished we stepped back to see the epic sight of
everything finally coming together, we were so close!

After everything was dry, it was time to attach the police box sign,
the pull to open sign, the handles (remember one for the door and one
for the phone box), and of course the St John's Ambulance sticker
(which I found online for just a couple bucks).  The door was finally
done and now ready to hang!

I was trying to add a bunch of picture's into the but I had a hard time getting them to come up.  Worked in the preview but not in the post, so I gave up and just uploaded everything with descriptions to Flickr.   You can check them all out here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/84505308@N06/sets/72157630963602562/  (hopefully haha)

[Scarfwearer]

What a great project! I'm sure Damian is the happiest kid on the block.
A bedroom door is often a good way to get a TARDIS vibe into a house, as the full monty is just huge.

I suspect you may have had trouble with the pictures because they're too large for the forum (at least the ones you put on flickr would be). If you shrink them down to 800 pixels wide or so, you should have no problems. Send me a PM if you still have trouble.

Crispin