Welcome back to the workings of My Door Company - where we continue our journey forward with the first posting of what is to be a regular segment entitled "Project of the Week." We will profile a current or completed project in detail, discussing specs, wood species, processes and procedures, carving techniques, and other details. We hope you enjoy the inner-workings of how My Door Company does doors and cabinets.
We begin with our first international project - My Door Company just completed and shipped a plethora of custom doors to a beautiful little island called St. John. This beautiful island, located some 800 miles south of Florida in the midst of the Caribbean sea, is all the more beautiful now that one of it's vacation homes is fully equipped with our official handcrafted doors! While technically St. John is, of course, still American soil, this job in the US Virgin Islands is our most sprawling project to date.This particular project consisted of both interior and exterior doors, all fashioned from African Mahogany. African Mahogany is sourced from the tropical areas of western, central, and eastern Africa, most widely used for cabinets and furniture, as well as for boatbuilding. There is a great deal of variance in the natural grain patterns and colorings of African Mahogany board by board (more than some other species), which is quite apparent in some the images posted here. This occasionally makes it difficult to work with in the machining process, as well affecting the look and tones of the finished product.
The doors consisted of 22 openings, both inside and out. The interior doors were single-door units with raised panels, as you can see above, and the exterior doors consisted of single-door units, double-door units, and four-door units with glass. Overall there were 37 individual doors total. The exterior doors, in contrast to standard residential doors, were all out-swinging. Traditionally, all standard residential exterior doors swing in, and all commercial exterior doors swing out (for fire safety and other issues). Because these particular exterior doors are in a home located in an area prone to hurricanes and other extreme weather conditions, they all swing out. Of course, this may be a detail that only door builders notice, but it does affect the types of thresholds and hinges that can be used. 
As you can see from the images, the style of the doors were simple, yet elegant with the round top of the single unit doors and curved corners of the multi-units. Even though the curves are simple and slight on some, the processes to curve wood for stiles, rails, and panels, as well as door jambs and moulding, are much more complex and challenging compared to the components required for standard square doors and openings. Overall, we had almost 10 crates of doors shipped to Florida, then turned over to a freight forwarder to deliver to the island. We used almost 2000 board foot of African Mahogany and over 20 gallons of glue for the 13 sets of exterior doors and 9 sets of interior doors. The doors were all of various widths and heigths, but the largest four-door unit was 12 feet wide and almost 9 feet tall - quite the set of doors to frame that island view!
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