We’ve spent the last year planning a massive renovation to our home and it’s finally happening. In fact, our garage and back porch are being torn down this week (while we’re living here!), and we’re set to move out at the end of the month. In the meantime we’ve been very busy sorting, purging, and packing.

My husband and I have spent 13 years dreaming about this reno. We live in a war-time home (also called post-war home, or victory home), which is common to many parts of Canada. According to the CMHC, more than one million of these kind of houses were built across the country between 1945 and 1960, and many of them only had a finished floor area of less than 1,200 sq. ft.. Space, or lack thereof, has been one of our biggest challenges, but space issues aside, our home has a great personality and we want to make sure that we don’t lose sight of it during this process.

For example: we want to keep all of our antique interior doors. (I have a thing about old doors. Remember one of my fantastic finds?) They’re solid wood right down to the core. They’re kinda creaky but totally amazing. They even have their original knobs and keyholes… which are unfortunately blocked up (which is too bad because I might have a key that fits somewhere in my collection):

Anyway, yes, our doors. I a-DOOR them. (Ha ha.) And I think if we find a place for our old doors in our new reno it’ll help preserve the character of our old home and maintain some of its historical character.

I didn’t have to work too hard to convince our construction manager to reuse our doors, but there are three extra doors I’m not sure what to do with. One is in the rafters of the garage and requires investigating, the second is our drafty old back door, and the third is another back door. The latter two have glass panes in the top half and would require some elbow grease. I’ve been trying to figure out how we can use these doors in a creative and useful way – and then present the idea to my husband and the construction manager. It goes without saying that it needs to be the kind of project that doesn’t make me sound like a crazy lady or someone who belongs in an episode of hoarders.  AND it needs to be something I can do myself more or less.

Here are a few things I’ve earmarked:

• You can take an old hinged door and turn it into a slider with the addition of a rail 
• You can make a really interesting corner shelf out of it
• You can turn it around and put it on the wall; here’s an old door made into a memo/chalk board
• You can make a table out of it. Here’s a coffee table on coasters (!)
• Here’s another take on the coffee table idea and another one 
• A porch swing
• And this is one of my favourites, a hanging table (outdoors no less)!