Have a look to see if it’s something you fancy tackling. I’ve included all the design and dimensions for making the door. Written and videoed the processes for a step by step, how to make a door guide.

Follow these plans for victorian style door and the ‘how to make a door guide’ to end up with a door like this.  

If it’s been a lack a available traditional style door plans that has put you off in the past, my appologies, now you have no excuse not to make you own door.  

Timber Exterior Door Design

DIY External Door Design and Proportions

Door Tenon Theory and cutting

Door Mortise Marking and Cutting

Timber Door Fox Wedging mortise and tenon joints

The panels and mouldings sections will be coming shortly.

Please let me know in the comments if you know of better/easier ways of making a similar door. Or if I’ve not included enough detail.

An old motor bike helmet with the head of a tripod bolted on and hey presto, my DIY Headcam. And it works, here’s the first test –  

DIY Head Cam Test

And the first How To video

I’ll need to get a bit slicker but it’s something to work on.

Whilst I was getting a big order for timber together, the wife asked me about the front door I said I was going to make. So I added a few extra length to order and now I’ve got another job on the list.

Never mind, I’ll enjoy it when I’ve started.   The trouble is starting, I’ve spent hours trying to get my head around Sketchup and only managed a visual representation.

Sketchup of Front Door

After spending ages creating this I literally went back to the drawing board. Within half an hour I had got all the proportions right and all the dimensions for the timber sections.  Paper and pencil, a fantastic combination.

Link to the full details Timber Front Door design details. Includes- using the Golden Ratio to get the proportions right.

NatWest ended up refusing me. Not sure what the real reason was as they gave me conflicting answers when I asked. I think it just boiled down to them not wanting to lend.

Next I tried the Bank of China mortgage option. This would have been good, it was only after I had applied that they told me they don’t do interest only. So another dead end.

After another few hours searching I found that the Post Office mortgage offering looked attractive. The information on their website is quite exceptional. All the criteria is laid out so you can asses your chances before applying. The Post office mortgages are arranged through Bank of Ireland, another source I had investigated. The only problem was an exclusion for re-mortgaging within 12 months of purchase.

The 12 months are now up so I’ll need to do another search to see if the market has opened up with any better deals. If I can’t find a better deal then I’ll be going with the Post Office.

I have already built one sliding sash window as a working prototype. It’s been installed now for for over a year and I’m happy with the basic design. For more details of the prototype build please visit my Sliding Sash Blog.

The next step is to have a bit of re-think on some of the details and make five more for the rest of the house. At the same time I’ll be recording, photographing and possibly videoing how to make them.

The intention is to provide the resource I was looking for when I started out on designing and building sliding sash windows a couple of years ago.  I would have been quite happy to buy the plans at the time but could find any.  Details are available of traditional single glazed windows but double glazing means quite a re-think.

The cost of purchasing modern sliding sash windows from a manufacturer or skilled joiner is way out of my budget. I’m also not convinced that all the design details they incorporate are appropriate.  It seems to be a booming market at the moment and I think there are some poor designs being manufactured and sold for a lot of money.  I want  design that will work for many years, that looks right and doesn’t cost the earth.

This leaves me with the only alternative to design and make my own sash windows.  

I have spent hours and hours researching and testing various ideas to come up with a near perfect design.  I’m hoping it’s going to be worth it. For a start instead of paying around £1000+ per window I should be able to build my own for less than £300 each. On Six windows thats saving me more than £4200. Certainly more than enough to pay for the extra woodworking tools I’ve had to buy.

On top of this I intend to sell the plans as a e-book to those who appreciate the effort I’ve put in and fancy benefiting from the time I’ve spent. 

When I’ve finished this batch I will have the plans, construction details and methods completed.  These will be formatted as a step by step guide to building your own Double Glazed Sliding Sash Windows. 

I’ll also but some articles together that covers the subject of sliding sash windows, double glazing in timber and the rational behind the design that I’ve put together.

I’ve been accepted for others but not done anything about it yet.  It’s time I had a serious think about the best way to proceed.  There are a few options.

1. Place the adverts carefully and leave them to it.

2. Design and write content to deliberately and shamelessly promote the advertisers.

3. Review various products, services giving an honest warts and all account of my experience.

Number 2 is not for me and not the impression I want folks to get from iDoStuff.  When I’m surfing for info I come across these kind of sites and immediately click off.

If I’m writing about something its going to be about my experience or based on my in depth research. I do have standards you know!

That leaves 1 and 3.  So suppliers and products I know, I’ll write about.  If I mention others it will in the context of,  ”These might be worth a look at”.

This doesn’t seem like much but if I achieve this it’ll add up to £520 in a year. It’s also an incremental target, an additional £10 per month. Adding up to £3376 per year. Subsequent years this effort will add up to – £6240 for very little additional input.

I feel it should be a realistic target although I’m sure it’s not going to easy.  I need traffic and I need good clicks. To achieve this I’ve got to put effort and time in to three areas.

1. Traffic for AdWords revenue - I need good quality content and links to it from good relevant sites. With quality content, not selling anything in particular, sites and forums tend to be willing to carry links. It’s very involving and time consuming on forums but informative. I keep getting ideas for content from the questions folks ask.

To get sites interested it a bit hit and miss so far – More work to do on this side. 

I also need to look into the world of feeds and ways of encouraging links to be passed on.

2. Content for AdWords revenue - More writing but making sure it will attract good high paying ads. These adwords need to be relevant to subject and the readers.  Before I go in to any subject in depth I’ll be looking in to what adverts and interest potential there is.

3. Format for AdWords revenue – Although I’ve done some work on this I’m sure I could do better. I might be overloading the pages at the moment. It’s hard to tell with the traffic I’ve got but as the traffic builds I’ll be able to see which placements and styles work best.

At moment half way through January 2010 I’m averaging  £6.22 .  I’ll see how I do.

Draughty door

I’ve draught proofed our problem front door. I had tried in the past without much success due to a wonky door, frame and floor.  After putting my mind to it, I came up with an easy and cheap way of draught proofing.

It might not be for everyone, some simple wood work  is required along with access to a router.

Have a look at details HOW I DRAUGHT PROOFED MY DOOR on the cheap

If you are thinking about buying a wood burner or multi fuel stove then this is worth a read.

We’ve been runing a stove now for over 2 years.  From our experience, I’ve reviewed and analysed the choice we made to Live with a Wood Burning Stove.

I’ve tried to answer the question.  Is Living with a Wood Burning Stove worth it?

Looking at the money side, the environment aspects and the lifestyle change in some detail leads me to answer “YES it’s worth it”.

Have a read through and see if you agree with my conclusions. Please leave me any comments, suggestions or queries. 

<< Read - Wood Burning Stove – Is it Worth it?>> Includes my wood burning stove running costs.

<<Leave a response>>

And..  Feel free to link to the article if you think others out there may find it interesting. 

Thanks,

Andy

With some Traffic I should eventually get some Clicks on the AdWords BIG BUT…The Adverts that AdWords is putting up don’t relate directly to the content. So they are not relevant and won’t get clicks.

The content is about “Buying Timber” <view it here> so I thought I’d get adverts from timber suppliers. I’m getting more for timber windows and joinery companies.  I needed to figure out how the AdWords are targeted.

But first, I did a check to see if there are any relevant advertisers out there. I did some searching directly on Google and found there are a few.  These are the few I want to get next to my content.

So how does Google decide which adverts to put up?

It’s keyword based, with some kind of adjustment for the the value of adverts. By this I mean, if  Google and myself can make more per click using a less frequent Keyword, then that advert will come up first.

To try and get the right AdWords up I’ve done two things.

1.   Used Section Targeting

I’m getting adverts for timber windows. This must be been picked up from a navigation link to my Sliding Sash  Window Blog. I’ve now used section targeting so the AdWords robot will put more weight on the intended page content.

To do this Ive added the following to my page template in the HTML code (to modify all the pages)

<!– google_ad_section_start –>     This placed before the text

<!– google_ad_section_end –>    This is placed after the text

There is another command that can be used.

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>  I might add this in as well before the navigation menu

I also need to see if  I know need to but the start and end around the meta data in the header. To get that looked at.

2.  Tweaking Content

I’ve gone through the content and attempted to increase the Key-Word density. Concentrating on “Timber Merchant”.  This is tricky as I want the text to get clunky, to has to easily readable.

The crawler robots put more emphasis on Headings, bold text and italics. I’m going to have another sweep through and see what difference it makes.

So far there has been a slight improvement in the advert relevance but it’s not good enough yet. Google states it can take up to two weeks for the Section Targeting to take effect.  In the mean time I’ll keep tweaking but I’m going to need patience.