So now I had an idea of what I wanted to create, I could start creating the mesh in Maya. Using the cleaner image I made as an image plane, I could essentially 'trace' it when creating and manipulating polygons. There are many tools in Maya at my disposal to help me create the perfect shapes needed for my vision (shown below) but I mainly used 2 of the below tools and other options available in the top toolbars:
Maya's Polygonal Toolset
Split Polygon Tool: Select a point on an edge to start cutting the face.
This tool is used if you have a face on your mesh that requires a new edge within it to enable further manipulation of said face. This also comes in handy when making sure your mesh has no 5+-sided faces or triangles.
Extrude Tool: Extrude the selected component.
The Extrude tool is used for elevating select faces from their original points of origin and creating raised portions within your model.
Bevel Tool: Round off the selected edge(s).
Bevelling is an excellent tool which gives edges a more realistic feel. If you were to look at any edge in the world, you'd see that it's not perfectly sharp (unless it's a knife). The left box in the above image shows a regular, un-bevelled edge while the one on the right shows a medium-strength bevel. The tool can be tailored to make very minor bevels or make the edges engulf the object, and gives models a much more 'real' feel.
Once I was happy with shape of my door, I checked it over for any faces with more than 5 sides, or any unwanted faces/edges/vertices. It was that I ran into a problem with the archway of my door. Since it was unfortunately beyond repair, I unfortunately had no choice but to scrap it as I couldn't recreate it so late into the models construction. Now the mesh was clean (with the help of Maya's 'Cleanup' tool, which added vertices/edges to faces which had more than 4 sides) I was ready to start UV Mapping the model!
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