Closing in the Kitchen

For the last few weeks we've been hymning and hawing about what to do with the animals at feeding time. There's a whole bunch of crazy stress centered around feeding times mostly because of JD. He tries to steal the other animals food and is quite successful unless one of us is standing over the other animal. As you can imagine it is not convenient. For months we've tried different scenarios mostly involving moving Suzie around. Now we've decided on what we hope will be the last and perfect solution -- a closed in kitchen.

Today Jeff started the process of hanging a french door on each entrance. We picked them up this week at Home Depot for $69 along with hinges and handles (about another $20) that match the kitchen finials. They actually only had one door, the other is on order (more on that later).

Before the door can even be permanently hung there was some prep work that needed to be done. The door had to be shortened to fit the opening. Space had to be chiseled for the hinges (3), and a hole had to be drilled for the handle mechanism. Oh, and Jeff's favorite part, it has to be primed and painted.

The image here is Jeff doing a pre-hang to make sure the hinges on the door align with the space on the door frame. It did.

At the moment of this posting he has finished priming the door and it is drying in the basement. If he has time tomorrow he'll put on the first coat of paint. Why am I not painting you ask? Because I suck at painting. It would be all over me, the floor, the glass, the ceiling, the animals. It's just not my thing.

The fogginess you see on the glass is to protect it while it's being painted, no taping required. Jeff is heading up for a shower to wash away the work of today. He tells me he's decided to return the second door we have on order to get an already primed door instead (painted and pre-drilled holes). Apparently the little extra money is worth the time and effort he had to put into what we thought would be a simple project.

I think the door looks pretty cool though! I can hardly wait to see the project finished so we can work on getting the crew into a new eating pattern. And of course I'm looking forward to the first time one of use walks into one of the doors.