(photo by Sophie Brendle Photography)
Hey its Eileen and I’m back today sharing one of my all time favorite DIYs. When we redid our laundry room last fall, one of the top things I wanted to add into this space was a dutch door.
(photo by Sophie Brendle Photography)
We have a golden retriever who we love and she loves everyone- she thinks everyone who comes over is there just to see her. Sometimes we need a spot to put her up so she doesn’t knock down everyone and we thought that the laundry room would be the perfect place. We didn’t want her to feel so separated from everyone so we thought of adding a dutch door. We can leave the top open when Rowan is hanging out in there or I can shut the top to hide laundry that has been piling up for 5 days!
(photo by Sophie Brendle Photography)
We started with a new door. If you have an existing good looking or even just plain door you don’t need to do this step but our door was really beat up and had a cat door in the bottom from the old owner. We hit up one of our favorite local spots, Pittman Discount Building Supplies. My friend and super talented local blogger Lindsay told me about this place and its amazing! Rows and rows of doors and cabinets and all kinds of building supplies- you have to dig but can find some awesome deals. We ended up finding this door that was about the size we needed for $15! We trimmed it down some to fit the doorway opening and added another hinge for extra support since we were cutting it in half.
Then Luke just cut the door in between the two panels. Don’t panic if you have a hollow door, ours was too! We just added 2×4’s across the openings to fill the empty center – wood filler makes sure you have a smooth edge to paint. Then we painted the whole door and installed hardware that I found on Amazon.
Looking for the hardware was one of my favorite parts, and I ended up going with this standard door knob, this latch to attach the top to the bottom section, and this pull for the upper section. We did have to carve out a little section to install the ring pull but there are lots of other options if you don’t want to do that. A simple knob or pull would work fine.
(photo by Sophie Brendle Photography)
The dutch door adds a fun design element to the room and also functions well to make our laundry room into a large crate for our sweet puppy. Do you like dutch doors and would you ever tackle adding one to your space? We found lots of good tips for DIYing dutch doors on Pinterest so you can search there too for lots of design inspiration for your specific space!
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