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| "Sometimes I have to pee in the middle of the night. Sorry." |
We've got a very large dog and a correspondingly large doggie-door. The rubbery
flap that came with the door, never great, warped and wore out over time
so the metal magnetic contacts that held it shut no longer lined up. We
found the manufacturer of the door was no longer in business so
replacement flaps weren't an option. Worse still, the door size was in
between the sizes for other doors, so replacement wouldn't be easy. Our
options seemed to be buying a new kitchen door, putting an even bigger
hole in the existing kitchen door, or building a frame inside the
existing frame to hold a smaller doggie-door.
After hours of fruitless googling, with banshee winds howling through the kitchen nightly, I racked my brain to figure out how to replace the manufactured flap with a homemade version, and wandered the aisles of the hardware store until finally inspiration struck. With about $20 of materials, a few hours of tinkering and some false starts, I made a magnetically-sealed flap that was far superior to the original: It worked reliably and sealed as tight as a drum! I was really proud of the replacement flap but had blown the chance to document how it was made for the next despondent googler.
A year later, when our new kitten came home and we locked the dog out of the house for a while, she chewed up my lovingly hand-crafted door and we were back at square one. Ungrateful bitch! On the other hand I was happy because I knew just how to replace it and now I had the chance to document how it was done... You want to know, am I right?