House Project #9: Laundry Room, Phase 2

The laundry/pantry is a small room with big doors. The door to the back room stays open most of the time since we keep the food & water for the animals out there and access the back yard and garage. The pantry doors are regular interior doors and take up most of the space when they're open. In addition, they're stained wood, and work against the creamy orange walls to make the space feel gross. I painted the same doors that are on each of the bedrooms and the bathroom, but I've been trying to come up with a solution beyond just painting for these.

I swear the builders got these doors on special. . .
every room has one, and this room has three!!

At one point I debated saloon-style doors which I intended to make out of large interior shutters which I had got my hands on. They were a bit too wide for the space and I would have needed to figure out a work around for the thermostat (we moved it into that space because the woodstove heat in the winter was throwing off the temperature in the bedrooms). I also decided I wanted to stick with doors that filled the space vertically, to reduce the amount of dog and cat hair that already makes it under the doors.

Back in May I found someone on Front Porch Forum giving away bifold doors from a renovation in here in the valley, and I knew they would be the perfect solution. I initially planned to keep them as bifolds, but couldn't find a short enough track to fit the space so I decided to repurpose them into double doors for each opening. I removed all of the bifold hardware, replaced/added new knobs, and found some narrow hinges to attach them to the door frames. The doors are narrower than the openings, so I also added 1 x 4 pine boards vertically into the sides of the frames to fill in a bit of space (we had to rip them down to 2.5 in to fit the width of the door frame itself). A few hours of nailing, swearing, pilot-hole drilling, and door-hanging later, and viola!

SOO much better! Not perfect, as there is a bit of a gap between each pair, but I already love how much lighter the space is.

Now I just need to replace the door into the backroom (I have a louvered bifold for that), paint the pegboard sections (still "raw" brown particle board), and lay a new linoleum floor, and that should finish off this space!

In case you missed it, phase one happened here!