Before making this door, I drove around our village on a Sunday with my camera and made lots of front-door-pictures. On the little picture you can see the original door from a house in Pijnacker.

Materials I used: wooden lathes, birch-triplex, plastic triangle lath, selfdrying clay, big paperclips, pins, ironwire and iron-band.

I first painted the boards with white paint (just normal wall-paint) twice or three times. It must be a thick layer that's really dry. Then I painted little pieces (10 x 10 cm, or approximately 4 x 4 inches) at a time with brick colored craft paint. When it was still wet, I sprinkled fine craft sand on the red paint. The paint colored the sand red immediately. You can also buy colored sand intended for "sand painting" at craft stores in the U.S. Then wait just for 10 minutes till it's almost dry and scrape away the
joins (mortar lines) so the white comes up. I scratched with a pricking-pen my children use or an embroidery needle alongside a see-through ruler (the ruler became red afterwards).

If the paint is all dry, you can't scrape the red paint neatly without scraping the white paint also. If the paint is too wet, it will fill the joins while scraping.

Over the years the white joins have become lightly beige or yellow because of sun, dust etc. I've noticed that my hard-board was better going then the softer balsa-wood pieces I used for the window sills. Then the paint absorbed into the wood too much. Maybe a good primer-sealer coat first would help in those cases. I also noticed that thick paint works better then new thin paint. The great advantage of this method is that one can always repaint or repair bits and pieces plus make patterns above the windows like real life exactly the size you want.

On top of each window I scraped two layers of wood away (the board I used are 5 layers thick and is called Multiplex-wood) to make window 'caps' from little mosaic-tiles. This was also just paint, this time without the sand. The last advantage is that, when I decided the windows fall INto the walls, I could go through painting the insides of the windows till the point it meets the wood of the windows. By the way: I also made the windows myself and they are still not glued so I can change the drapings on my table and wallpapering behind the window-trimming.