For good reasons, we still get frequent questions about the doors on Cindy’s design studio at The Waters in Pike Road. Over the past 20 years, hundreds, if not thousands, of people have been photographed in front of them.
We acquired the doors during the initial construction stage of The Waters’ Town Square building. Early on, we asked the construction foreman to take a look at them and make sure they would work. “No problem, we’ll take care of it,” he said. But later I discovered there were, in fact, challenging issues. Never assume that modern-day builders will have a clue when it comes to making antique doors work with new construction.
Soon, I was being told that, in order to meet code, the doors would have to open out. Cindy’s doors were designed to open inward. They would have to be taken apart and reassembled. When I asked the foreman who would do that, he shrugged.
After a couple of weeks of asking around, I discovered a crew of lean, long-bearded characters: JR, Butch (also known as ZZ Top), and Joel. They resembled bad guys in a Clint Eastwood western. But they sported cool tools rather than six-shooters. I soon learned to appreciate them for what they were. Master craftsmen. They convinced me they could do the job and soon had the massive 9-foot, 7-inch-tall, 4-foot-plus-wide doors detached from their jam, and the jam dismantled.
JR, Butch, and Joel generated great clouds of dust. Other crews on the site were choking and gasping for air. But my bearded craftsmen seemed unfazed. Indeed, they were joyful as they bragged about what awesome doors these were and what a privilege it was to work on them. “What’s this going to set me back?” I asked. They stared at the doors and pulled on their beards. Except Joel. He laughed and danced away like a pirate full of rum.
Butch changed the subject. “Come look at this!” He scratched on the jam with a pocket knife. “This is solid mahogany! These doors need to be stripped and refinished! They’ll be incredible! I can’t believe somebody painted over this beautiful wood! And look here.” He pointed at a date written in black paint on the unpainted side of the jam: 1809.
“What’ll it cost to strip them and refinish them?” I asked. He scratched his beard.
With JR and the boys dominating the entire space, the other subs couldn’t get their work done. With reservations, I decided to let JR take the doors to his place in the country, where they could work undistracted, take their time, and properly refinish them. They gathered up the two tall, narrow mahogany doors with their serpentine tops, their massive ball-bearing hinges, the hand-carved shell that sat atop their center, and the walnut-carved panels that adorned their bottom. They gathered the heavy Spanish iron grills and the glass doors that were shaped to fit over the grills, and the hand-carved center-piece fluted column with ionic capital. They loaded it all into their old dilapidated blue truck, along with their tools, and lurched away into the sunset.
I scratched my own three-day-old beard when I heard Joel’s maniacal laugh as they rumbled away. Then I imagined little green dollars streaming from the shop and racing after them down the dusty road.
A week or so later, I was itching to have a look. It was late evening. JR’s place was thirty miles out in an adjacent county. The doors were kept in an old metal building about a hundred yards behind his mobile home. Old dead trucks and cars lined the muddy road back to the shed, making my high-mileage Volvo nervous as she fought for traction. A few mangy dogs circled me and howled as I walked toward the entrance. Butch emerged with his toothless grin. I was pleasantly surprised to find JR hard at work, as well as Rita, whom I was meeting for the first time. They were gracious and excited about the doors. I couldn’t help but feel proud of them. Rita almost cried when she spoke of what an honor it was to be a part of the project. I watched her remove centuries of layered paint from the carved fixtures.
They had discovered that one of the doors had been badly damaged and hastily repaired. Many years before, in Buenos Aires, something or someone had knocked out the lower one-third of the left door. Fragments of a concrete block were found beneath a compound that had been plastered over the gaping hole in the wood.
Pieces of a Buenos Aires newspaper had been stuffed into the cavity. Rita had removed the newspaper and neatly deposited little scraps in a plastic bag. One piece read Domingo…de Diciembre 1, 1968. Perhaps the shattered door once belonged to a politically prominent Argentine Republic family whose home in December 1968 was the target of revolutionaries? Or maybe a bomb had exploded in the street, sending shards of concrete smashing through the door. If only these doors could talk!
Christmas 2006 was days away. Cindy and I were excited to meet Rita and the guys at the shop the morning they brought the doors back. That’s when we discovered that, because the right door was mitered for an inside swing, if the left side was bolted, the right would not open at all.
We had to reverse the hardware and the security sensor. I visualized more little green bucks poking their heads from the shop and dashing away through the trees. I saw them piling into canoes and paddling across Lake Cameron.
My experience incorporating antique doors into new construction taught me lessons. Matching trim for antique doors is very expensive. And never leave parts lying around. We lost original hardware when someone thought it was junk and threw it away! Hardware manufactured in Argentina hundreds of years ago can’t be matched.
No one gives estimates on such projects because they don’t know what the work entails until they get into it.
Wish I knew where JR, Butch, Joel, and Rita are today. There’s much more to giving old doors new life than meets the eye!
Jeff Barganier is a novelist, travel writer and speaker. He travels far and wide upon the slightest excuse for something interesting to write about. His novels include Lawson’s Bluff (2021); The Slash Brokers (1998). He also manages Cindy Barganier Interiors LLC at The Waters in Pike Road, Alabama. Contact Jeff at Jeffbarganier@knology.net. You may print out his features at www.jeffbarganier.com and take them with you when you travel!