Building Gypsy Rose

How many have had the pleasure of hearing a wooden screen door slap closed against a wooden stop? It’s a sound that I heard thousands of times as a kid – every time I came in the back door.

What do we hear today? The hissing sound of a hydraulic door closer pulling a metal storm door into a metal stop? No thank you. Gypsy Rose is going to greet her guests with a bit of nostalgia. We wanted the “smack” of wood against wood, pulled closed by a simple spring.

We began with a threshold milled from 5/4 Meranti and a built frame to match. (Nope, there are no pre-hung doors in this project.) Next, we searched for the smallest Douglas fir wooden storm door we could find (2’ 6” wide x 6” 8” tall). We had to cut it considerably to fit our opening – 2’ 4” wide x 6’ 3” tall – but the scaled down rails and stiles were much more in proportion with Gypsy’s dimensions.

For the finishing touch, we found a remarkably simple, beautifully engineered latch and lock set made by Von Morris. It took much of the afternoon to hand-cut the 2” x ½” x 3” deep mortise for the assembly, mortise the latch plate, and install the hardware, but, in the end I gave the door a swing and there it was, “smack!” That resoundingly nostalgic and oh so familiar sound of a wooden screen door striking a wooden stop.