Friday, October 22, 2010

Matching Door Lintels

Craftsman homes always have a handful of special details that make them stand out. On our house, each door, window and porch is decorated with a custom lintel. We like to refer to them as the door/window eyebrows. We've added a couple different sets of custom doors, and we have a lot more custom work to do. It's important to us to preserve the original details of the house, and to do so, we first had to find matching trim stock. After paging through catalogs of trim stock at McClendons, we identified identical trim. That's good news, because if we didn't find it, we were going to have to custom build it ourselves, or have someone else match it and cut it for us.

The top lintel looks like this:

From The Making of a Craftsman Home

Pictured on the right is an example of the original. The is made up of three pieces: the flat stock, the trim, and the top cap that is beveled to shed water away from the house. The one of the left is the replica built to surround the french doors we added in the kitchen earlier this year.

The finished product after installation:

From The Making of a Craftsman Home

It makes such a huge difference having these details carried on throughout the house. Eventually, we'll be adding these details to the workshop windows and the other set of french doors we installed off the library. Now that this proof on concept is complete, we're confident we can build these and make them match the house exactly!

1 comment:

Kurt said...

We did make our own cap, which is shaped like an L lying on its back. We made this out of an old piece of cedar siding ripped to the right width. We then cut a diagonal through all but a quarter inch in order to leave a short lip which slides under the layer of cedar siding above it.