This blog post might seem kind of random, but I recently fixed a problem that has been plaguing my apartment for months and thought it might help someone else out.
If you live in an older rental, you can sometimes get a bad case of phantom door: when cupboards won’t shut all the way due to old hinges or too many coats of paint that build up over the years.
It’s totally a minor annoyance, but one day I decided I was tired of slightly-ajar doors and took to the aisles of Home Depot to try and find a solution that wouldn’t leave lasting marks.
If you Google solutions, the first thousand results will tell you that the proper thing to do is take off the door and re-adjust the hinges. However, that seemed like a recipe for disaster when you’re a novice DIY-er. So I went to Home Depot and picked up two options to see which would work better: this roller catch hardware and this magnetic latch.
Both of them were really easy to install. You drill a few holes and screw in the included hardware. However, I ended up preferring the roller catch one a lot more. It seemed to take up less space and hold more securely.
The only problem I ran into was when I originally installed it in the top corner of a long pantry cupboard door so it would be unobtrusive. The handle of the door is in the middle, so it ended up being difficult to open (ugh, physics, right?). To fix it I just moved the latch to the middle of the door so that it will open easier without sticking.
It worked great and I love how easy it was to make a little annoyance go away forever. It also led me to an epiphany, which was this:
I love my little home, but reading blogs about adding removable wallpaper to “boring” white walls when I would actually kill for white walls instead of uneven plaster ones that have 3 different shades of beige paint slapped on them can get depressing.
When you’re constantly peering into the world of Instagram-perfect houses, it feels pointless to even bother improving your real space with all it’s many imperfections. So it felt really refreshing to realize that the smallest thing made my apartment instantly more livable. Someone make that into a poster and sell it on Etsy, because I probably need a regular reminder.
Anyone else feel the same?
