CAT DOOR

When the first lockdown hit, we started to seriously talk about getting cats. We’d always figured we would adopt a couple of older cats but had intended to wait until the major building work was finished. But after being stuck at home every day, we started really wishing we had something furry to love and care for. I found myself surfing rescue sites in the evenings, but none of the centers were open to allow adoptions. And that’s when it hit me… kittens!

See cats don’t understand things like lockdown. They’re still out there, getting preggers and having kittens. I figured there might be some in our area needing a new home. I’ve always wanted to have kittens, but since we both work 9-5, we wouldn’t be around enough to look after them. But hey, now we’re stuck at home all day every day!! Suddenly this lockdown has an upside – we could get kittens!

So we looked around in our area and sure enough, there were some Maine Coon cross kittens available nearby! I’ve always been of the opinion that the larger and fluffier the animal, the better… so a kitten with even a hint of Maine Coon was right up my alley! (Not sure what I’m talking about? Just google Maine Coon and you’ll see!)

Enter the cutest little fluffballs you ever see… Moose and Smudge!

I can’t handle the cuteness…

They really made lockdown just the absolute best. I still find myself looking back at photos and videos from when they were wee little things and it makes me want to get more kittens aaaaaall over again. (Richard keeps saying no.)

So cute!

Anyways, what was this post meant to be about again? Ahh, right. My secret cat door.

The plan

I don’t know about you, but I’m not really a big fan of the way most cat/dog products look. Who decided that brightly colored plastic everything was the way to go? If it’s going to be on display all the time, it could at least look nice.

So now that the cats are getting a bit older, we have been talking about where their litter tray will live. It lives in the living room at the moment, where we shut the cats in each night so they don’t get into mischief. But eventually, we’re planning on moving it to our under-stairs cupboard.

The only problem with that is how do they open the door?

We obviously can’t leave it open all the time, but traditional cat flaps just look so… bleh. I wanted better for myself my kittens (yes, I still call them kittens).

So I looked online at some tutorials where people converted one of the panels on a paneled door into a hidden cat flap. They all used really clunky mechanisms, so I tried to come up with something hidden. My idea was to install some small metal rods into the sides of the door and then router a groove/track into the sides of the panel that they could slot into. Then, in theory, the panel would just swing on the rods.

Oh, and apologies up front for the lack of progress photos, or just good photos in general. Most of these are crappy iPhone pics, as I was sort of making it up as I went along.

Turning plain into the paneled door

The door in question was actually not a paneled door to begin with. It was clearly not the original door, but something they must have swapped in at some point over the years. Because it wasn’t as thick as a normal door (only 18mm), I knew that I could add thick MDF pieces to the face of it. That would create the four-panel look, without adding too much weight/depth. I based the dimensions of the panels on the original doors with have in the house, scaled down appropriately to our smaller cupboard door, and cut them out of 12mm MDF.

Before they all got nailed into place, I marked the inside of my secret door and cut the panel out. I had to drill two holes in the corner to get the jigsaw in, but I knew I could fix that later with wood filler. Once the panel was out, the MDF got wood glued and nailed in place. I could go into detail about filling/sanding/painting the door, but I think that’s all pretty self-explanatory.

Secret door mechanism

I picked up a length of 6mm steel rod at B&Q to inset into the door frame and finally plucked up the courage to learn how to use a router. Luckily, my router bit set had a straight bit that was 6.35mm in diameter. I figured that if I routered a track using that bit, the rod would perfectly slot in with just enough wiggle room to swing about.

Using an angle grinder, I cut two lengths of the steel rod, 20mm long. I thought that I could drill into the door 10mm, leaving 10mm exposed for the door to swing on. There was no real science to the height that I chose for the rods to be installed. I just eyeballed it to where it made sense in terms of gravity allowing the door to hang mostly vertical when not in use. For my actual panel which is 535mm tall, that ended up being 95mm from the top.

I measured the door frame first, marking the same distance down from the top on both sides (95mm), in the middle of the original door frame (not including the added MDF). Using a 6mm wood drill bit (in a right angle drill attachment since the opening was too narrow), I drilled 10mm in for each rod. A bit of glue in each hole and they got hammered into place.

Next up, I needed to router a track to allow my door to slot in and then hang. Basically, I drew a hockey stick shape (see below), 6mm wide, so that the rods could enter from the back of the secret door and then slide up. The stopping point had to be exactly level with the top of the rods, otherwise, my door wouldn’t line up. I did it in a couple passes of the router, being careful not to go past the top mark. If the sides were a bit wonky, no big deal, but the top line really mattered.

And it worked! Well, mostly.

There’s always going to be a bit of sanding required to make it swing perfectly without catching. And the thickness of your panel will make a big difference. Since my door wasn’t a normal four-panel, the swinging part was actually a lot thicker/heavier. So I ended up sort of rounding the back edges, top and bottom, to allow for a perfect swing.

Finishing touches

Now that it worked, I just had to make it look pretty! I purchased some ogee panel trim at Wickes to match our existing four-panel doors, and installed it around the inside of each normal panel, with glue and some veneer pins. For the swinging door, the trim was installed on the actual panel, not the door.

Nail heads were sunk, everything got filled and sanded, and then it was paint time! I painted the door in a custom color (which we dubbed “‘Bout Ye”), like all the trim. I couldn’t find a dark green that I liked, so we color-matched it from a mixture of F&B ‘Bancha’ and F&B ‘Pitch Black’.

The swinging panel had to undergo a few more rounds of sanding once the door frame had its final coat. With the clearance for the swing only a couple millimeters, layers of paint can get in the way. I just had to keep testing it, sanding it back, painting… and then testing again.

The final result!

Add a shiny new beehive knob and boom! Secret four-panel cat door.

Part of why I think this works so well is that the panels naturally have a shadow all the way around due to the trim. So if there’s a subtle gap all the way around one panel it blends in. It would look even better on a proper four-panel door, where both sides have panels. The inside of this door is flat, which means that you can see it from the inside. However, it’s not as clunky as some of the mechanisms out there, so I’ll let it slide.

I also just had a lightbulb moment where I realized I should have routed from the bottom straight up the side to my stopping point. You could slot it in that way and never see where it goes in! If anyone attempts this, do that!

The only niggling detail is that I’d like to sink a couple magnets into the bottom edge of the panel/door. Right now, if you open the door, the panel starts to swing. It would also help the panel stay perfectly vertical all the time. I know I have some perfect neodymium magnets somewhere in the house, so I’ll add them once I find where they’re hiding.

But hey, it works! And it’s a far cry better than what was there before, don’t you think? Do you feel like attempting your own hidden cat door? Or am I the only crazy one…

If you follow me on Instagram (or you’re related to me) you’ve probably seen these spaces as we work on them. They’re a long way from done, but already look so different! The few months since we got the house have been crazy, so we haven’t been able to do as much as we wanted before moving in.

The layout of the house hasn’t changed drastically since it was built, way back in 1890-ish (still researching to nail the exact date). It was built as a two-up, two-down. So there are two main rooms on both the ground and first floors, divided by a very narrow staircase.

On the ground floor, the two original rooms are the living room to the front of the house and dining towards the rear. Back when the house was built, the dining was most likely the kitchen, with a scullery and toilet out the back. I found plans in our local council’s archives of a nearly identical house built on our street, which had them labelled as such. Will I ever know for certain? Nope. But hey, I like to make uneducated guesses.

We’ll start the grand tour with the living room.

Gorgeous fireplace, right? And that carpet colour? Oooooooohhh… you can see why we bought the place, right?

The first thing you’ll notice about this house is that while it might have been built in 1890-ish… it has absolutely zero character. They ripped out every good thing over the years (coving, fireplaces, woodwork, floorboards, etc.) and replaced it with ‘blah’. The 60s have a lot to answer for when it comes to housing.

Why did we buy this house again? Oh yeah, proximity to the train station, shops, quiet street, and the fact that it’s basically a blank slate. I would have preferred a home with character, but definitely didn’t want one where I had to redo someone else’s renovations. I hate the idea of buying a property that someone ‘flipped’, only to pay more for someone slapping on white paint and installing a bunch of builder-grade finishes. Character I can add!

When I’m through with this place, you won’t know that it didn’t start out full of charm and character. Unless you are reading this blog, of course…

Back to the tour!

The living room is a bit awkward in terms of layout possibilities because it’s narrow and the placement of the bay window/fireplace/doorway means that there’s really no good place to put the sofa/TV. It’s like the Bermuda Triangle of awkward layout options. My first choice would have been above the fireplace, but Richard dislikes it when TVs are so high up. Then I suggested no TV and we put a projector in the bedroom (ha! That didn’t go down well).

So now we’re working on a compromise layout that will incorporate some library built-ins!

It’ll mean that the bay window is a bit underused, but hey ho. What can you do? I get library built-ins and sconces… I call that a win!

Moving on to the dining room…

Oh hey, another amazing fireplace! And those floors?! 

Be still my beating heart…

The dining room (former kitchen) is probably the darkest room in the house. With narrow doorways and only one window (which is shaded by our neighbour’s house), this middle room needs some serious love. It’ll serve double duty as a dining room/entryway since the teeny tiny space at the base of the stairs isn’t going to cut it. We still need a place to put down our keys, stash shoes, etc. so I’m going to have to get creative in here.

I have big ideas around incorporating the original cabinets on either side of the fireplace and playing around with contrast trim paint, I just need to get Richard on board. So far he isn’t quite sold on all my plans…

Moving on!

On the other side of the dining room, we have the kitchen and two and a half bathrooms. Only the kitchen was part of the original footprint, but it probably wasn’t a kitchen back then. I imagine that they moved the kitchen when they converted the fireplace in the dining room. The cavity there is the biggest in the house, and most likely would have had a wood stove inside.

It’s the kind of kitchen that professional chefs only dream of, right? Also, carpet in a kitchen?!

It’s a super awkward layout, with the kitchen a thoroughfare of multiple entry/exit points. It’s the biggest change we want to make in the house that will require moving walls and steel beams to address. That’s phase 2 renovation territory as we just don’t have the capital to tackle it now.

Okay, let’s head on through the kitchen to the weird side-by-side bathrooms…

Oh look, cheap, boring bathrooms… and for whatever reason they decided that two toilets side by side made the most sense. Richard likes to joke that we can now poop side by side and talk through the wall. I sure picked a keeper…

Alright, let’s head up those very narrow stairs and take a peek at the upstairs.

The house originally had just two bedrooms on either side of the staircase (hence the fireplace locations). At some point, they added a small room on top of the new kitchen, which required dividing the second bedroom to create a hallway. And of course, they built the wall with those amazing glass windows…

The hallway, middle and little bedroom all had carpet tiles, which you can see in some of the photos. They weren’t stuck down at all, so the moment we got the keys I picked them all up in order to get a better look at the floors. I forgot to take photos before I did it – whoops! Just imagine all these spaces feeling much darker with navy, brown and beige carpets everywhere.

Because of the new hallway, the middle room no longer has a fireplace (boo) and there’s a big chimney breast in the hallway. It’s not ideal, as we can’t really add a nice fireplace (too narrow) but I have plans for making it a feature anyway! Two words: exposed brick.

We hadn’t planned to do much to the middle bedroom yet, since our phase 3 plans involve a loft conversion and part of this room will become its staircase. However, we ended up deciding to refinish all the floors upstairs in one go, so out came the wall! We’ll build a new one with the doorway shifted over and frame it in such a way as to accommodate future loft access. We definitely won’t be adding huge glass windows to our wall, but will most likely incorporate transom windows above the doors, letting some much-needed light into the hallway.

Next up, we have the ‘little’ bedroom at the end of the hallway.

It’s just a wee little room (hence the name), which means it’s only really suitable as a nursery/box room. But then we thought, what about turning it into a bathroom?! We really want a family bathroom upstairs and figured it was a much better use of the space.

We’ll still have three bedrooms once we convert the loft upstairs, but this way I won’t have to walk so far when I have to pee in the middle of the night.

Rounding off the upstairs, we have our master bedroom.

Oooh, so fancy, so grand.

It’s not a terrible size, but the narrow layout (like the living room below) makes adding storage difficult. The wee closet is currently doubling as the access point for the loft and housing a large water tank. Eventually, when we redo the kitchen we’ll get a double boiler installed, getting rid of this tank and another one in the loft.

It’s not much right now, but we’ll add plenty of character and try to make it worthy of being a ‘master’ bedroom.

Alright, let’s head back downstairs and through the kitchen, to finish off with the backyard!

For people who love to garden as much as we do… it’s laughably small. Our street is at an angle which means that gardens get progressively larger the further down you go. Guess which end our new house is? Yup, we have the smallest garden on the street!

In case you couldn’t tell from all the apples on the ground, the big tree that’s sort of smack dab in the middle is a nice old apple tree. If it was anything else, we’d probably get rid of it because of its awkward placement, but nope. We’d feel too guilty, ha. And of course, Richard has grand ideas of making cider from it too.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking about how there are probably lots of people with way bigger gardens who don’t use them at all, and then remind myself I’m lucky to have any garden at all. Back when we lived in the flat we could only BBQ at the allotment picnic-style! Anything is better than nothing after all.

We’ll work hard to make it feel so much larger than it is. Plus, with the aforementioned allotments (three plots!), we have more than enough growing space for veg – this space will just be pretty flowers and a wee outdoor dining area. But those plans will have to wait until we tackle the kitchen since it’ll involve digging up new trenches for pipework etc.

Although with the whole coronavirus thing, we might need to do some quick fixes to make it function better right now. I have a feeling we’ll be spending a lot of time in our backyard this summer…

And that’s it! Can you see the potential? We sure can (otherwise I doubt we would have bought it – ha). I can’t wait to start seeing some of my ideas becoming reality.

Waaaaay back in March, we listed our flat on the market and started hunting for the perfect house. We debated a few areas and neighbourhoods, but in the end came back to the good ol’ London Borough of Bexley. Our new house is actually just around the corner from the flat!

When it came to the neighbourhood pros and cons, we looked at commute (we both work in London), schools (both for resale and in case we’re still living here by then), house prices (could we afford to live there), resale potential (could we make money) and the overall ‘feel’ of the neighbourhood. Some of the areas seemed amazing on paper but when we visited them and walked around… just didn’t feel right.

Some neighbourhoods were too ‘up-and-coming’ (to put it nicely). We knew the value could go up over the next 5-10 years but didn’t really feel comfortable living there. Others were too pricey (here’s looking at you Hither Green); we debated Sevenoaks, because we liked its ‘quintessential English’ feel, but the commute and prices just made it unsuitable.

So we sat down, talked through everywhere we had looked at and realised that we both actually liked living in Sidcup! It’s not that we were lazy and didn’t want to move – Sidcup has a lot going for it. I actually can’t understand why the market here isn’t more expensive!

It’s got great rail links (22 minutes to London Bridge), green spaces (Five Arches is lovely), convenient shops (Waitrose, Morrison’s, Boots, Holland & Barrett, etc.) and, as I said before, great local schools. And the biggest bonus? We can keep our allotments!!

Our new house isn’t perfect (yet), but we’re going to make it something really special. I have sooooooo many plans and ideas, as you can imagine – I just need time and money, ha. Want a sneak peek? Just check out this mess!

Oh, and in case you weren’t sure it was meant to be, the house has a name (which I have always wanted by the way)… Victoria Cottage. Yup, I didn’t give it that name, it already had it! It’s the name of the city where I grew up, which I named this blog after… so of course it was the house for us!

So stick around this space and see how we’re turning this old house into our dream little cottage… it’s going to be amazing.

Now excuse me while I order a custom address stamp… I’ve always wanted to have a house with a name…