Ever thinking about that we first supplied this house, seven and a half of years ago, there is been one detail about it that drives me absolutely nuts. The workplace closet has a pair of sliding doorways, and they're pretty awkward to use.
First of all, like any sliding doors, they pleasant permit you get entry to to 1/2 of the closet at a time. That way that in case you want to vicinity some thing large in there (just like the field we use to save Christmas affords earlier than wrapping), you want to open one aspect absolutely, stick the sphere in as a ways because it will bypass, after which shape of maneuver it into region.
But I ought to stay with that if it have been no longer so bloody tough to get one door open within the first location. As you could see from the image, they don't have real handles, only tiny little finger holes. So to open one, you need to sort of poke the pinnacle of 1 finger into this shallow little hollow and pull as difficult as you could with just that one finger, and the door resists and resists till you sooner or later control to squeeeeeeze it open handiest a 1/2 inch or so, at which aspect you could stick your hand within the hole and push it open from the opportunity issue. (Brian keeps that it is surely less complicated to squeeze your palms in spherical the edge of the door, close to the top, and pry it open?However Brian's a foot taller than I am.)
It changed into once even tougher, due to the truth the doors are secured to a song on the pinnacle, however the bottoms have been just dangling free about an inch above the ground (like all of the different doors on the principle degree of the house after the removal of the vintage, thick carpeting). So they would honestly wobble anywhere in the place every time you attempted to drag or push them. Eventually, Brian introduced a chunk dingus at the lowest (I accept as true with it clearly is its technical call) to hold them loosely aligned, but they may be nevertheless by no means cooperative.
Fixing the ones doorways has been on our to-do listing for over seven years, but it stored getting get rid of due to the fact different things have been extra pressing, and so the doorways simply stayed as they have been, persevering with to harass me every single time I attempted to open or near them. Things came to a head one morning after I modified into seeking to wrestle these doorways open so I ought to retrieve the laundry basket we preserve in there on an better shelf, and the whole mess stored bumping and shifting, and it one way or the other controlled to jar the laundry basket free just so it came down on my head. After hurling it into the mattress room with possibly needless stress, I controlled to inform Brian very frivolously that what I desired for my birthday this 12 months became a new set of closet doorways.
I figured replacing the sliding doorways with new sliding doors would not truly assist topics, because of the reality that there may nonetheless be no proper manner to keep them aligned, and it'd despite the fact that be no longer viable to open greater than 1/2 the closet right away. A pair of French-style double doors, hinge-hooked up on contrary facets, would possibly provide us get proper of access to to the whole closet, but we would ought to go away a whole lot of room for the swing of the door on every sides, and we'd should completely redo the doorframe to house the brand new hardware. So we determined compact bifold doorways regarded like our superb wager, and we headed all the way down to the big-container stores to look what sorts they'd available.
One requirement for each human beings changed into that they had to be actual timber. Neither folks ought to stand the concept of putting in place a massive hunk of plastic in our house, even plastic etched with faux wooden-grain to make it appearance (from a distance) like real timber. Besides, with the off-white walls, we concept a pair of undeniable white doors would leave that complete wall searching too flat and easy. With timber, we have to stain the closet doors to healthy the relaxation of the interior doors on the principle stage, simply so that they had mixture in with the relaxation of the residence.
That requirement narrowed our picks down to two:
- A solid-core, six-panel door in unfinished pine, for $89 apiece (marked down from $99), or about $180 for the pair.
- A much cheaper hollow-core door with no trim of any kind, covered in "lauan" (which my dictionary informed me was "another term for Philippine mahogany"), for about $28 each.
The main problem with the nicer doors wasn't actually their price; it was, as Brian put it, that hanging them in ouroffice would make it clear just how shabby the rest of the room was. In the seven years we've owned the house, we've redone all of the downstairs rooms, but most of the upstairs ones haven't even been touched; the office still has its original unmatched wall outlets, wrinkled corner tape, painted-over wall hardware, a small section of patched wall that's never been painted over, and a badly damaged (and inexpertly patched) outer door with a mismatched knob. By buying these nice closet doors, we'd basically be throwing our caps over the wall, forcing ourselves to tackle a complete top-to-bottom makeover of this room.
But as you can see from the picture, we went ahead and got them anyway. So getting these stained and finished and installed is going to be our next project—and presumably, it will also be the first phase of the much larger project of redoing this entire room. Fortunately, the floors are okay, and we have decent furnishings and window treatments—but all the little things, from entrance door to wall sockets to paint and trim, will have to be redone. We're hoping that we've learned enough from our experience stripping and painting the guest room to get this one done a bit in a bit less than the three months we spent on that one.
