Building T&G Plank Doors

In this video from Finish Carpentry TV, Richard walks viewers step by step through building a custom tongue-and-groove (T&G) interior door using WindsorONE boards, showing how to lay out symmetrical beadboard patterns, create a stable stave-core-style slab, and assemble the door with glue and blind nailing. Filmed inside a purpose-built mockup “lab,” the tutorial covers everything from story pole layout and ripping techniques to planing, trimming, and finishing, making it a practical, entry-level guide for finish carpenters and remodelers who want to add a clean, farmhouse-inspired T&G door to their projects.

TRANSCRIPT:

Yeah, but let me call you back. I just wrapped up that surgery on that mantle. It was like three hours, and I’ve got to get started on something else. I’ll talk to you later.

Hey guys, how’s it going? Welcome to the lab here at Finish Carpentry TV, where we’re going to be showing you all kinds of examples and builds—really anything you want. It’s going to be very interactive, so make sure to leave your comments below.

Today is the first installment. We’ve kind of built this mockup room here. You can see it’s a 10-foot ceiling, about 12 by 12. Our first project is going to be this T&G door that I just stepped out of, so we’re going to show you that in this video.

For future videos, make sure you leave your questions below. We’re going to be using all WindsorONE for this, so I’ll leave a link to their catalog at the top of the description. You can go look and see what moldings you want to see used.

Just to give you an idea, when we get into this, we’ve got a coffered ceiling up here, a Craftsman fireplace right here, and we’re going to be putting a window right here that will have a wainscot meeting up at the stool. We’ve got several ideas for this space, but we want your ideas as well. This wall, for example—we don’t really have plans for that yet. We’ll probably be extending it forward this way. We just threw down this laminate floor so we had something to walk on and to make it look more realistic.

With all that, think about what you guys want to see, and let’s get into making this T&G door right here.

Materials and door layout

These doors are really popular in farmhouse, coastal, and cottage styles.

We’re going to be using this material here. This is the WindsorONE S1S2E BC8. It’s a tongue-and-groove board that’s 7 1/4 inches wide by 23/32 thick. This is a reversible board. We’ve got our back face here, which is the standard tongue and groove, and the front face is this beaded side. It’s reversible, meaning you can choose whichever look you like—either a smooth, simple look or the beaded look where it’s divided up more.

For this door build, we have our rough opening, and we need to figure out how big the door is going to be after all of the reveals. I already did that math, and I ended up at 35 1/4 inches for this opening. I cut this piece of trim to 35 1/4. This represents the width of the door, and this is going to be a right-hand inswing door.

We’re going to take this story pole, lay it out on our trim boards, and it’ll tell us where we want to split the pattern—both on the beaded side and the tongue-and-groove side.

Finding the center and splitting the pattern

Now that we know how wide our door is, we’ve got that story pole. I’ve cut samples of the material we’re using, and I’m going to stick these together.

Remember, it’s 35 1/4 inches. We want to find the middle of that, which is 17 5/8. I’ve marked that right in the middle. You can see a pencil line there.

What I can do now is bring it down and get it so I’m splitting one of these large spaces between the two beads right in the middle. We’re going to match up our story stick right with that center line.

Now I know that if I go off to the right, I’ll end up right here. If I go off to the left, I’ll end up right there. That’s the cool thing about this—you can line it up and know you’re splitting evenly in each direction, and it’s going to match.

When you walk into the space and see that door, you’ll see the same reveal on both sides. You won’t have a wide plank on one side and a tiny sliver of a bead on the other. That’s really crucial.

Cutting boards to length

I’ll start by taking my full 16-foot lengths of WindsorONE boards and cutting them in half to 8 feet. My overall door height is going to be less than 8 feet, so these will be long enough that I don’t have to worry about lining them up perfectly during glue-up. I can cut them flush with a track saw later.

After I get all these boards cut, I’ll move on to ripping. I’ll adjust the fence to get the correct pattern, and that looks about right to me. I’ll do a little test cut right on my line.

I actually left a little bit of the line there, and that’s good, because at the end I’m going to run a cordless planer across this whole thing. That’ll clean up any saw marks left from here.

I’ll do the exact same setup on the opposite side that has the different pattern.

Building a stable door slab

At the end of this, we should have about 35 3/8 inches, but I still need to pull everything together. They’re roughly in place, but I’ve got to get all those tongues and grooves fully seated.

This is going to be an extremely stable door. By putting two of these WindsorONE boards back to back, it’s basically like a stave-core door. You’ve got all these finger-jointed boards going together. You don’t have to worry about warping or twisting. These boards are going to be extremely stable—especially when we put two of them back to back.

Planking and dry fit

We have our two door skins planked up and ready to go—our beaded side and our V-match side. We did the exact same layout process to arrive at an even, symmetrical reveal.

Now it’s time to lay these down on our table and nail them together.

I’m happy with the dry fit. I’m going to take off the top beaded side so I can begin installing these together. I just need to separate this top side.

I am going to glue these together. It won’t bond perfectly like it would if it were unprimed, but it will give me some peace of mind and help stabilize it a bit.

Gluing and blind nailing

We’re going to do this just like we would a T&G ceiling. I’m going to blind nail it. I’ll start here, get it flushed up on this corner, and work my way all the way down, blind nailing as I go.

This first board is the key, because everything else will reference off this one. Looks good. Now I’ll just work my way down, nailing about every 8 inches or so—on the face where needed and as a blind nail in the tongue.

As I move on to the next plank, I want to keep bringing these joints together tightly.

One thing to mention with this second plank: as it comes into position, you can see it spans the joint below it. When I nail this in, it’s really going to lock that joint together. I’ll probably add a couple of face nails here and there just to really tie the whole thing together.

It’s important that the opposing board joints are not on the same line. If they were, that would create a weak point and make the door unstable.

If you wanted beadboard on both sides, or V-match on both sides, you’d need to add a sheet of plywood in the middle to avoid those weak points.

Planing and trimming to final size

To assemble the rest of the door, we’ll just repeat that same process. Our top priority is getting those joints locked together.

Once everything is glued and dry, we’ll come back with a cordless planer and run it a couple of times along the sides to flush everything up, remove saw marks, and make sure both boards are in plane with each other.

After cleaning up the edges, we’ll cut the door down to its final height. We’ll cut from both the top and bottom to ensure that if anything was slightly off during glue-up—which we weren’t worried about—we can correct it here. Cutting both ends ensures everything looks nice and flush.

At this point, I’m going over it with some 320-grit sandpaper just to scuff it up, because we’re going to hit it with a couple of spray cans of primer to clean it up and make it look good.

Finished door and final thoughts

There you have it—a nice, clean T&G door. We went ahead and built the jamb, added the hardware, and just a simple latch. This is all a mockup room. We went with brass hardware, and I think the brass with the white really pops.

We sprayed it with primer to clean it up, including the edges. I think it came out really good. It’s a super simple door build—entry-level, basic stuff.

One thing I want to emphasize about this build is that because we alternated the design—flat T&G on the front and beadboard on the back—we didn’t have to add a plywood core. If we had used the same pattern on both sides, we would definitely need something in the middle to tie them together. Otherwise, with no staggering of the joints, the door would be weak and could fold or flop.

If you do use the same pattern on both sides, a 1/4-inch piece of plywood in the middle is plenty. Two 3/4-inch boards plus 1/4-inch plywood gives you 1 3/4 inches, which is a pretty standard thickness for a solid-core interior door.

Other than that, look at this thing—it’s a beauty. I’m pretty pumped to see what we do with this place next. I think it’ll be the window and then starting the wainscoting. We’ll show you a couple of different options for that.