That $&#$^!@ Pantry Door: A Friday Hooray

I work in email; I know better than to use a subject like the one above. If you see this email at all, it will likely be in your spam folder. Oh well, it gets the point across, and I’m in the kind of mood where I just don’t care.

On March 2, 2018, I was induced three weeks early. Then to spice things up, on March 5th, we moved. We certainly know how to have fun in our family.

We found a house with enough bedrooms, and it was worth it. I would try to adjust the timing a bit if I had to do it all over again, but it was what it was.

The people who sold us the house had a dry erase calendar on the pantry door. I think they used some of those 3M hooks on the hollow-core door. They decided to take the calendar and the hooks with them when they moved. Unfortunately, the hooks took great big chunks of the cardboard from the white door with them.

We’ve been busy since March of 2018, and I have tried so hard to ignore those four chunks of missing door bits. But oh, how they have bothered me.

My pandemic project has been to solve this issue. It’s been a piecemeal project, and one of those things where good ole Murphy has been having a field day. First, I had to get a door. We don’t have a truck, so that was something I wasn’t quite sure how to manage. Ray solved that by getting rear-ended on the interstate and totaling my car (everyone is fine, and that was absolutely not his fault). We got a full-size minivan and a door nicely fit between the seats. So even though you didn’t check to see if my husband or children were ok after hitting them, you ended up doing us a favor, lady.

In a fit of productivity in one weekend, I removed the old door, painted the new one, added the doorknob, hung it, and discovered that the hinges made it too wide by 1/4″ to close.

I looked at the old door and saw that the hinges had been set into the door itself, allowing the door just to fit.

For the past several months, our toddler—not the baby we had in 2018, the one we had in 2019—has had a grand time opening the pantry door that will not shut and unloading the lower shelf, usually to test the buoyancy of items in the dogs’ water bowl.

I assumed that fixing this issue would require an expensive tool or skill set I didn’t have, so I ignored it for a few weeks. Because as you know, procrastination fixes all problems.

This week, I finally broke down and turned to Google, where a quick search showed me one cheap tool would solve my problem.

Who knew?

So all of that is to say, two years and seven months later, may I present to you, my Friday hooray:

It took me about about half an hour. Yay.

No, I’m not painting the walls or trim until the baby gates are down.

What is your Friday hooray for this week?