After 11 years in our house, we finally got around to replacing the drafty, cheap metal entry door. I mean, sure, I could have made it better (and I did, some) but we also wanted a bit more glass, both for light and to be able to see out. After much hemming and hawing, we picked a specific door, AND made the giant leap to change how the door swings.
Our house isn’t big, at least, not in any one floor’s footprint. So when you came in the entry door, you looked straight ahead at another door just 4' in front of you. That used to be a “coat closet” but it’s only 12" deep, so hooks only. I made that into a pantry years ago. To get to the room where we keep all our shoes, jackets, gloves, hats, etc. you had to either a) close the door part way and step awkwardly around it or b) open it 180 degrees and go past it, by the main staircase, and into the mudroom.
NO MORE!!
The door now swings open in the direction you WANT to go, so you walk in and go directly to the mudroom (behind me in the pic above), even without opening the door past 90. AND, because the door isn’t centered on the hallway there, it also now opens toward half the hallway and a set of stairs, rather than half a hallway and the door to the former coat closet-now pantry.
It also puts the handle on the “near” side as you walk up the angled walkway, and in hindsight, we should have made the change YEARS ago, but who knew? It’s more intuitive to us already, and I think within 48 hours, the muscle memory of the way it was, is totally erased by having it finally be RIGHT.
However, one member of the family can’t quite get it, and lines up to the wrong side of the door, every time.
Why is no one opening the door.
Come on, daddy. Open.
She was so flustered when I opened it the other way, she jumped all the way off the brick steps and went around behind me, to very tenuously come in the other way. Oh, poor thing. She’ll figure it out soon enough. But she’s 10, and we’ll cut her some slack!
Meanwhile, we have to decide what color to paint this door. Don’t hold your breath.
Oh, and the coolest thing how on the storm door, when you want to slide the top glass down, the screen unrolls from the top of the door. And when you slide it back up, the screen just retracts back. Switching the storm door from screen to glass used to be a Big Decision every year, “oh are we done having fresh air through the front door... is it warm enough to put the screen in yet...” Now you can just go from glass to screen instantly, as often as you want. What a world we live in.