DIY: New Addition to the Cave!

So this next post doesn't really relate to baseball cards but if you recall I posted about the wife and I re felting an old table to put in my Man Cave as a poker table and it seemed quite popular with the readers... so here is my next DIY installment!

Now my wife and I bought our home a little over a year ago and since then I've been working on odds and ends to finally make my Man Cave an acceptable place to play cards, watch sports, or get sent to the dog house.  It's been slow going at times, but I've got a lot of little quirks in it that I feel will make it one of the best (in my circle anyway) and you just can't rush these kinds of things. 

About a month or two after we moved in I was on the phone with my brother and was having a random conversation and at the time I was just nosing around my basement just really getting the lay of the land.  The basement is partly finished with the one half being my Cave and the other looking more like a natural basement.  The Cave portion is walled off in a unique type of way because our hot water heater and A/C unit is set in the middle of the basement floor.  Essentially my cave has a sort of horse shoe shape to it as it is designed around this obstruction.  For most of you this may be hard to picture... so I took the liberty of drawing a photo! 

(However I didn't draw this for the sake of this post but for the lay out of how I wanted to set up my man cave... everything was scaled down so that I could see exactly how all of my furniture would fit... feel free to make fun of my anal retentive nature at any point)

Now you have a better idea of the lay out and will understand this next part of the story a little better. 

So like I was saying... I was checking out my basement talking on the phone when I went back behind the hot water heater (which would be the other side of the wall behind where you see the card catalog) and saw these two dust covered pieces of wood.  I couldn't really tell what they were because they were tucked so far back in this corner, but when I unearthed them I couldn't help but laugh at my AWESOME luck!

Now my house was built something like 50 years ago or maybe 40.... I really don't remember, but regardless the place just yielded a lot of little nifty secrets and cool shit that I couldn't believe just came with the house.  Some people might have thought this junk... I am not one of them.

Behold... the ultimate accessory for a man cave...

SALOON DOORS!  WHAAAAATTTT!!!

 

I freaked out on the phone talking to my brother.  I couldn't wait to get these things up on the wall.  Well finally a year later that started to happen.  I had found them and then stuck them in a corner to be used later.  When I went back to them and took a closer look they were all kinds of gross!  First thing I did was to remove the old hardware that was attached to the doors.

 

Stuff was nasty and rusted mostly.  After that I went to Home Depot to get new hardware so I could hang them properly.  At first they tried to sell me some hinge for an actual full sized door that was $16 per hinge... that's what you get when you ask for help I guess!  At least they got me to the right section of the store.  After a minute of scanning I came across this!

 

and only at the modest price of $6! 

 

So I took my new hardware home and started on my doors.  First thing I needed to do was clean them.  I'm sure I could've done a better job then what I did but I still think they look 100x better then what they did.  I'll likely end up painting them, but check out my before and after.

 

Before

 

After.

 

Would've looked a lot nicer if I had let my wife clean them!

(I'll pay for that later, but she knows it's in good fun)

 

So after I got them scrubbed up I went to put on the hardware!

 

 

For the most part it was easy but I did run in to a snag...

 

The holes already in the doors worked fine for the new hardware at the top, but I needed to drill new holes for the bottom hardware but ran in to a problem with the spacing of the old holes and the new ones!

 

So back to Home Depot I went.  I needed a simple wood putty to fill the old ones so I could drill my new ones!

 

This product worked great!  I simply filled my old holes and let it set up over night.  The next day I sanded them down and drilled my proper holes and attached all my hardware!  Now I was ready to mount!

 

Sadly I got so caught up in putting them up that I forgot to take some photos to document the rest of the way so lucky for you, you get to be spared these other details and get to see the final product.  Check it out!!!

 

 

They work GREAT and look hella sweet!  Who needs a crummy old door when you can have these bad bitches hanging on the wall!?!

 

Most of these doors go online for about $100 to $300!  Not a bad little find at all!  Stay tuned in the future for the full unveiling of the Cave!

 

Till Next Time... Thanks For Reading!