AC Cabinets – Part 3

Currently 2 of the 3 AC xox frames I made last March are wrapped in plastic to keep the cold out.  I never knew how much air blew in through our [in-wall] ACs until last week during the bitter freeze.  Brrrr!  So I temporarily wrapped the living room & bedroom boxes in plastic [we shut the girl cave door when it’s cold so I ignored that one].  It made me realize we need insulated† AC doors asap!  So yesterday I got started and built one set.  I’d already bought the wood last March so I just had to measure & cut:

        

They looked great when laid out on my work table:

I used my Kreg Jig to drill pocket holes in the smaller pieces:

        

And clamps to screw the pieces together into frames:

        

I climbed up the ladder in the girl cave and pulled that box off the wall to use as a door template.  The doors looked so good when laid on top:

Last night I added a coat of primer to the first set of doors & called it quits:

This morning [it’s Martin Luther King Day so no work] I built the 2nd & 3rd sets of doors.  I ran into 3 problems, 2 with knots:

        

And 1 with a cracked piece of wood:

I had to re-cut all 3 pieces and reattach them to my frames.  Then I used wood glue to glue Kreg plugs into the pocket holes:

        

Tomorrow I’ll be able to sand them down flat with my orbital sander and finish priming the doors.

The last step was dry-brushing primer onto the 6 door panels I bought at Michael’s last year.  I had aaaaaaallllllllllllllllllllllllllllll spring, summer, & fall to spray paint them, but no… I procrastinated.  And I don’t own a paint sprayer, so now I’m stuck dry-brushing them.  Which actually worked really well, it just took a very long time.  To let them completely air dry I screwed 6 long screws into random parts of my workshop cage and hung them to dry overnight [the primer is white but in the pictures they still look wood colored]:

        

Tomorrow I’ll be able to dry-brush them with wall paint to match the living room, girl cave, and master bedroom, then staple them inside each door frame:

        

Hooray for progress!

† I hadn’t realized we’d need insulation on the back of the doors until last week, so I ordered some oven-mitt material on Amazon [#affiliate] which will be here Friday.  I’m planning to staple that onto the backs of the pretty panels.  It won’t look as great as without, but it’s a definite necessity!

I ended up using pieces of rigid insulation on the doors, not the fabric.