Doggie Gate

Latest project: a new pet gate for our dog, Saleen. We used to keep her in the back room, but then the roof started leaking and we didn't want to leave her back there anymore. So her bed moved upstairs to my office, and we let her roam around between upstairs and downstairs. Except we don't let her in the bedroom, because she crawls under the bed and won't come out. Haha.

And recently, since I got a new rug for the living room, we don't want her in there since she licks a lot and sheds everywhere. The old pet gate we were using to keep her from going in there was broken and chewed up from previous days we left her back in the back room - she would always try to escape!

So we ended up picking up a new gate a week or so ago, except it was a bit lighter than we preferred. So....we decided to stain it dark!

We figured why not, since we thought it looked really plain and unfinished the way it was, and we already had little pots of stain on hand from other projects.

We went with the darkest stain we had - Minwax Red Mahogany.

Trent just did some light sanding first, then rubbed it on with an old rag.

We thought about putting poly over it, but decided to just leave it as is after one coat of stain. It's just a pet gate after all! And we can always poly it later if we want. After a couple of days drying, Trent installed it - just some hardware and screws into the doorway:

We like it because it's easy to open and close:

And we can open it either way if we want to just pull it open on the kitchen side, too.

And it looks so much nicer than that plain looking one. Let's hope Saleen can't figure this one out. :)