Indoor cat door

This may seem like a weird thing to some people (or maybe an obvious thing, I don't know), but putting a cat door on our storage room door was genius.

To explain, when our basement was unfinished, Danger (the cat) could just run downstairs to get to her litter box and her food and water. We had a door at the top of the stairs with a chain lock on it, so I would keep that on but the door open and Danger could slip through that little 6 inch gap and my daughters could not. Our stairs looked like this,

{These are some freaky steep stairs, folks.}

so it was really important to make them inaccessible to our toddler.

Well, I started thinking about how I would handle the littler box and the cat food as we got closer and closer to finishing and one day it occurred to me that we could just put a cat door on the storage room door to cut off toddler access to those things (Eleanor is still 2 or 3 inches away from being able to get an actual grip on the door knob, so a closed door will be enough of a deterrent for awhile yet). I wouldn't have to worry about having the door open for Danger and closed for Eleanor. Brilliant!

The installation was very straight forward and simple. I followed the instructions that came with the cat door we got (it was this one) and basically just found the center of the door, traced the shape of the cat door so it would be centered, then cut it out with a jig saw and screwed the door in. So simple.

My jigsaw lines weren't perfect, but the cat door has that little casing bit that covered them up. I'd do a whole hallway shot, but right now the hall leading up to this door is so full of junk that if I backed up much farther the cat door would be obscured by boxes. Hooray!

So, now that I've shared my genius plan, what do you think? Would you have cut a big ol' hole in your brand new door? 

So much better

I have a door in my living room that opens onto a porch that we don't ever use.  The plan is to enclose the porch and have it be my craft room/office someday.  Ahhh, someday...
Anyway, I saw a post about giving flat doors a paneled look with moulding a few days ago.  I can't find it anywhere- if anybody out there knows what I'm talking about, let me know so I can give them the credit for inspiring me.  All the interior doors at my house are flat and varnished wood, like the one above (except without the windows), and it's always been my plan to add moulding and paint them, but I think I might actually get around to it now (at least within the next few months).  It really was inspiring to see how good the doors looked after.  So, last night I was thinking about how I wanted to change my doors, but thinking about how the Depot was closed and how I've used up my craft allowance already, so it wasn't going to happen until next paycheck, but then I looked at this door (the porch door).

HA!

I realized I could change how it looked for free.  Hopefully it will tide me over until I can buy moulding and do all the rest of the doors.  I was ok with them for so long, but now that I've seen how they could be, I'm itching to paint and panel them all. 
Here's how the porch door looks now:

It brightens up that corner so much- it's awesome.  And I just used leftover trim paint, so like I said-FREE!

Another thing that made a difference to me- see how much more the hardware stands out?  It's cool stuff, too.  It's kind of bronzey coppery and I really like it.

The hinges:

Now I just need to figure out some curtains for it- no way am I putting the old blinds back up (they were old and had a permanently dirty look to them).

Ah, it feels good to have done something.