Hollow Spots In Solid Wood Door Stile?

It's a weird one. A drunken rookie went way too deep < forgot to set the stop >

when starting to drill out the mortise ? Dunno. John T.

It could be the ends of the peg slots that holds the door together.

When you shine a light into the holes what do you see. If it is pegs or "biscuits" slots you may be able to see the ends.

I don't recall that I saw anything in the holes. Too late now...it's all glued back together and rehung.

This is the closet, just for reference. 7' deep and no light until this weekend. You almost stumble walking back to the right rear corner due to the settling. It's down over 3" from front left corner to the right rear corner. Old houses are such a joy to work on.

That does seem odd, perhaps it was a mistake at the mill? I wonder if they just said "close enough", or if maybe there was a market for "seconds" back then?

That does look like a popular style 30's era door, it may have always been there, even if the closet was something else. Perhaps the door was recycled from somewhere else in the house. It must be a pre-50's door either way.

Even if there was a market for seconds, there was no way for any buyer to know that it was a second because all of the "hollow" was hidden inside the stile. Only the most obsessively honest of a person would have divulged that there were hollow spots inside the stile.

It never would have been discovered if that edge hadn't have cracked off.

Here's the closet. We have no idea when it was built.

All of that is above a crawl space, which I why I believe that it may have been a back porch at some time in the past.

Your daughter has a very well trained dog, or a quite small dog.

Many years ago there was a pretty lab that would come over and visit my wife while she had coffee on the back deck. This went on for a long time. One day we went to a neighbor's garage sale, and my Wife recognized the lab in the short fence and said she enjoy him coming over when she had coffee. The lady was sure it was not her dog, as she put him in the fenced yard before work and he was still there when she got home. We let her live with her illusions.

The door is assembled using aortice and tennon typoe joint, which requires milling slots into the styles - and if they are milkled a little longer than optimal they will leave a "cavity" in the door. If the door was 'repurposed" at some point in it's life by cutting the styles down a bit to narrow the door, these cavities get closer to the edge of the door

French Bulldog, so not so big.

We were concerned with him going *under* the fence as opposed to over it. That's where some of the modifications came in.

If you look at the far side in this image, you'll notice that some of the bottom rails are lower than others. That was to make sure that he couldn't sneak under where the ground dipped downwards. However, all of the upper rails and the tops of the pickets are even. The sections with the lowest bottom rails have full size pickets. For any section where the bottom rail is higher than the lowest, we trimmed the pickets so that the tops were level. I trimmed 120 pickets. Each (unmodified) section has 12 pickets and I could cut 4 at a time so it wasn't that bad.

Makes sense.

Mortise holes. If they were perfect some one would have paid way too much for that door. X`Rays on old furniture show voids in mortises and my furniture, which I build, has voids in it's mortises.

Many of our neighbours have the in ground invisible fencing - it apparently works very well .. John T.

Yep - I like that one - Clare gets a Gold Star ! John T.

May keep the dog in, but it won't keep the coyotes out. Not sure how a cat would react, likely find a way to break it.

Not a fan of them, electric shock is not a postive reinforcement.

L O L ... John T.

When we lived in VT the neighbor had an "invisible fence". His lab figured out how to defeat it. Twice. He would go up to the "fence" until his collar started beeping (warning that he was about to be zapped) and laid down until the beeping stopped (battery ran down) then took off like a bullet. I don't remember the fix for that but his next trick was to run as fast as he could across the fence. He'd get zapped but he'd be gone before he got hurt too bad. When he did this, of course, he never came back on his own.

If you want to keep coyotes out, get a pair of llamas. My cousin has a couple to protect their sheep. Works great. Coyotes will give them a wide berth. ...or you could get a wabbit.

The shed is a very clear add-on... hard to say about the closet/porch area, but likely an old enclosed porch like you said.

The fence looks very nice!

Hopefully he's not a digger!