Knock Knock!

Part of our plan for the house renovation includes acquiring a few doors, namely the following:

1. 1 pair of French doors to become our new front door (since we'll be closing off the current front door in order to make room for our ensuite)
2. Another pair of identical French doors to become our new home office front doors - these will be on the same wall as the other French doors, opening onto the front verandah (which we will be opening up to actually be a verandah again)
3. A new door for our new ensuite

So, in our travels to demolition yards, we've been keeping our eyes open for options to fit any of those locations.

French Doors:
We've discovered that it's actually quite difficult to find two matching pairs of nice French doors, so our choices were fairly limited. We actually purchased two pairs at a demolition yard, and then as Tom was loading the doors into the ute, I discovered another pair in a different area of the warehouse. Of course the second pair were more expensive, but we decided to go with them instead. I think the two pairs ended up costing us about $800, but it's well worth it, they're gorgeous.

They're currently being stored alongside the bathtub in the old bathroom (that's going to be demolished eventually).

And here's a close-up

Ensuite Door:
We've done a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on this decision. Obviously the sensible thing to do with the ensuite door is to get one just like one of the other doors in the house. The existing doors are:

This is the internal door on most of the rooms - the bedrooms and the rooms that will become the bathroom and laundry

This pair of doors are currently the entrance from the lounge room into the sleepout. That area of the sleepout will eventually be closed off and become the office

Another factor to throw into the mix is that the area that's going to become the ensuite has a fancy window that it would be sensible to match:

Another part of the problem is that the ensuite is going to be a very small room, and the wider the door is, the smaller the shower has to be. What's more, anything other than a narrow door will impinge on the bedroom too much, since it needs to open outwards. So! Armed with that set of requirements, I'm surprised we found any options at all.

Because of the bedroom space issue, we decided that we'd really like to have matching double doors, so that when opened, they'd reach out into the bedroom space less. But then finding any double doors that were less than 450mm wide each proved to be extremely difficult, and at that rate, they'd be 900mm wide and take up MORE width of the wall than an ordinary single door! We did find one single door option that was 600mm wide, but it had really ugly yellow stained glass in the upper area of it which we would have had to replace, the timber detail on it was very plain, and it cost about $300 as it was, which was pretty steep.

Then, prompted no doubt by some kind of Divine intervention, we just happened to stop over at a mini demolition yard on our way home from the dump one day, and discovered two of these:

They are 400mm wide each, so two of them would actually take up exactly the same amount of width as the other plain internal doors in the house. While it would have been ideal to have them even narrower so we could have more space for the shower along that wall, we have to settle for what's actually achievable at some point

Here's a close-up of the design in the glass:

That kind of filigree-ish design really appeals to us, so we immediately fell in love with it. Common sense then stepped in though, and I started wondering about how well it would go with the existing fancy window in place. Not only is the design very different, but the glass itself has a feathery pattern rather than simply being bevelled (like in the decorative window), like so:

So, attempting to be very mature and grown-up about the decision, we left without buying them, and mulled it over for a week or two. Although I still can't really reconcile the difference between the design on the doors and the design on the window, they will still look so pretty, and match our tiling concept so well. We just couldn't pass them up. What's more, Tom managed to negotiate the price down from an already cheap $190 for the pair to $150 for both, so we're laughing!

Can't wait to install them all, but that's going to be a while away yet.

Love,

Bec