Craptastic

The craptastic kitchen door is back.  I have admitted utter defeat.  But strangely, I feel better now that it's back.  Allow me to explain.  (This is a somewhat long explanation, so if you want you can skip to the funny story in the next-to-last paragraph.  I won't be offended.)

Note the year on the calendar.
Hey, the days are the same, so it works.

About a year and a half ago, I decided the door between the kitchen and the laundry room/enclosed back porch was just too ugly and awkward to tolerate any longer.  It's a wider-than-average door (the doorway is the original back entrance to the house; the door is decidedly not original to the house) and it opened against the fridge, so when the door was open, and you opened the fridge door, it bumped against it.  The open door also blocked the trash can and recycling bin, which because of the layout of the kitchen can't be put anywhere else.  So, in a snit, I took the door off and shoved both halves of it down the basement steps.  I intended to buy a folding door, which would've looked nicer and not stuck out into the kitchen awkwardly.  But guess what?  They don't make single folding doors that wide, nor do they make double folding doors that narrow.  Grrr.  The chirpy woman at the big-box store told me I could special-order a folding door the size I needed, but I have better things to spend my money on. 

However....not having the door there at all proved way more problematic than having an ugly door there.

First, winter came.  The laundry room has no HVAC and no insulation in its walls (not that the rest of this house has insulation in the walls, either) so it gets mighty chilly back there.  All that Arctic air wafts into my bedroom, which is conveniently located just off the kitchen and laundry room.  Last winter I hung a big fleece blanket in the doorway to block the air.  You won't see that crafty idea on HGTV, I tell you. 

Second, the laundry room is bright and sunny.  This is a nice feature if you're a daywalker person who sleeps at night.  It's irritating if you're trying to sleep in the daytime and, even if you close the bedroom door, sunlight streams in through the kitchen doorway and through the transom above the bedroom door and right into your eyes.

Third, the animals can't be shut in my room while I'm trying to sleep because they have to potty, or they bicker, or they need a drink or a snack.  (Like little kids, really.)  Simply shutting them out doesn't work either because Louis Cat sticks his paws under the door and rattles the door in the frame or Libbi (my dog) scratches on the door because she's lonely.  They also have access to the kitchen that way, which means little kitty pawprints on the kitchen countertops (eww!), Louis popping open the cabinet doors to go spelunking in there, and Mean Little Marie turning on the kitchen faucet. 

So the craptastic door is back.  In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I braved the basement (and found a dead, petrified mouse on the dirt floor down there), retrieved the two halves of the Dutch door, and re-hung it.  I hadn't bothered to take the hinges off the door when I removed it, so re-hanging the door took about 10 minutes.  And I put this off for 18 months.  I amaze myself...and not in a good way. 

Roughly five minutes after I hung the door, herded the animals to the laundry room, shut the door, and latched the flap on the pet door, Marie tore the flap off the pet door, breaking both the plastic hinges and the plastic latch in the process.  I attempted to re-create the hinges and the latch with Hello Kitty Duck Tape, but Marie tore the flap off again and then became even more enraged when the tape stuck to her paws and fur.  (If you ever have to pull Duck Tape off an angry cat, I recommend donning heavy gloves and using a big piece of cardboard as a shield.  Less blood loss that way.)  Now there is a baby gate in front of the door, which is closed.  It doesn't look stupid at all. 

And then, something wonderful happened.  I went to bed and got 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep.  No cats stepping on me, no dog burrowing under the covers, no Gracie licking my hair.  And when I woke up, the kitchen was just as I left it.  No water running (Marie can turn the water on, but not off), no cabinet doors open, no cardboard dragged out of the recycling bin and chewed up.  Wonderful.  I expect more wonderful things when I get home this morning and any mess or chaos that occurred overnight is confined to the laundry room, which is now a giant kennel. 

Craptastic door, I think I love you.