Bernadette's Pony

We killed two birds with one stone last week. We divided off a part of the downstairs kitchen, and we finally found a use for the "Bernadette doors."

The big cooktop and range downstairs backs up to the swinging door into the kitchen. It's an ugly thing to see when you enter the kitchen, but it's functional and it keeps idle foot traffic out of the cooking area. It's been this way since we got the range about a year ago.

Last week, we built a little half-high pony wall behind the range to shield it from view and make the entry into the kitchen a bit nicer. It's nothing substantial: just some 2x4 framing covered with 1/4-inch drywall. I even turned the 2x4 sideways so the wall is thinner than standard. The whole thing is anchored to the floor and the kitchen wall, and has a cutout near the bottom to accommodate the big gas shutoff valve.

That part was all pretty straightforward, but to dress it up we re-hung the old kitchen cabinet doors we'd saved from our upstairs kitchen remodel back in 2010. If you recall, that kitchen had a bunch of old, falling-down cabinets with hand-painted doors signed "Bernadette." We saved the doors and they've been sitting in the garage all this time. We knew we wanted to keep them, but we never had a good use for them -- until now.

Turns out, our little pony wall is exactly the right size for five of the Bernadette doors. Four of them are a matched set, so we mounted them with their hinged sides outward, and even bought new knobs for them, as if this was a kitchen cupboard. The fifth one is the same height as the others but a different width, so it lives off to one side. There are still two or three oddly shaped doors left in the garage. We may mount them up on the walls as decoration. No reason to leave them behind.

One of the doors was badly weathered when we took it down. Maybe it got more direct sunlight than the others, or maybe it got splashed by the sink over decades of use; we're not sure what happened. Kathy's done a good job of matching the green paint that Bernadette used and she's touching up some of the damaged areas. It won't be a perfect match, but it already looks a lot better than before. And now people coming into the downstairs kitchen can look at Bernadette's hand-painted doors instead of the steely backside of our range. Much better.