I want to install a barn door across the opening to the master bathroom. There is no header and I don't mind there being an open area above the door for extra air flow. What is the best way to do this? Also the 2 walls are not perfectly square. They are off about +/- 1/2". Any thoughts?
Doors – Barn Door with no header
bathroomdoors
Related Solutions
hard to say without knowing more about the floor plan. Maybe they're in a longer section of floor. Maybe there are plumbing fixtures that required a shift in layout. Who knows?
It doesn't much matter whether you use one header or three, but you'll want trimmer studs supporting it or them between each pair of doors. Otherwise you'd need to size the header for the full span, and that would probably call for a LVL beam.
That 2 x 12 is over engineered. I'm guessing this is an older house, built when large dimensional lumber was much cheaper.
First, See this question Proper size of header to support new door in load bearing wall?
It looks like you can conservatively get away with 2 2x6's on edge for the header, and some cripple studs to fill the empty space (Ignore text on img) - 
I'm still trying to figure out how you're getting four inches in there without moving that wall stud at the far right of the picture.
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Best Answer
I suppose "no header" would mean that it's a passageway, clear from floor to ceiling, rather than having a foot and a half of wall overhead as a doorway would. Rather than saying the walls aren't "square," maybe it would be more clear to say there's a jog or offset between the walls on either side of the passage -- they aren't collinear.
Mounting a barn door here shouldn't be terrible. Barn doors hang from and slide along an overhead track. Choose one with a track that looks stiff enough it won't deflect sideways nor sag in the span across the passageway.
The offset between the two walls can be dealt with by shimming. Blocks or a strip of wood could be mounted to the "background" wall to create a surface about the same depth as the "foreground" wall; then the door hardware could be mounted to those blocks on the one side and directly to the wall on the other side. That's just one idea. It might be possible to use thicker blocks on one wall and thinner blocks on the other so as to keep some consistency on both sides. Or maybe the track mounting hardware for the specific door you'll choose would be adjustable so that the space between the door slab and the wall is adjustable. If so, simply adjust it far from the wall on one side and near to the wall on the other side.