project 1: secure pantry

The majority of the closets in this house, including the pantry (and excluding the under-stair area) have sliding doors. This wouldn't be a problem except that 1) the doors hang from a track and were not secured at the base, so the boys looooove to swing them in and out and push between them, freaking me out. 2) the track system/ wheels are bent or otherwise distorted to the point that the doors in the pantry and one closet will not stay on their tracks, which make things interesting. As in, loud, cumbersome, and dangerous. Also, we have been battling mice (and winning, slowly, but winning) and the doors as they are now leave a sizeable gap along the floor, which means that mice can get into my pantry. EEEWWWW. Granted, so far they can only get in to the floor area, where I don't have any food, but still. The mice needed to be excluded (I'm sure they disagree), the doors needed to be secured and, oh yes, the doors needed to be securable (as in, lockable) so that two little boys would stop serving themselves whatever they saw and then leaving it to rot on my kitchen table. Also in my living room, on the stairs, in their bedroom...etc. The madness had to stop.

So, I got some strips of wood, had them cut to size, went back and got the correct width when I found I had a 2" wide board instead of a 3" wide (grrr), and built a track system of my very own, based on the danish credenza my mother owns. So far, so good. The doors stick a little, as the bottom corners have been roughed up, but, the gaps are gone, the doors stay in the doorway, they are moveable, and they cannot be swung to the point that the Ikea safety latch can be popped open. Hooray! I am going to sand the doors a little and wax them and the tracks (and paint them), but those are tasks for another day. A day in which I have money and go to the hardware store. Here is the really awful picture, because I really didn't feel like trying to move our table out of the way in order to have a better angle. I did move it a little; usually the chair shown is right against the doors if someone is sitting there, so the chair at the other end is pinned against the back doors right now, but that's ok. You can see the remaining beadboard waiting to be installed on the left, which is also on my list, but I'm tired of sawing things so that's gonna wait a bit. I also have to get the trim for that. All of this is on my list.



Project 1: Complete! Projects 2 & 3 are in progress. Yay!

-happily, nava