A few weeks ago I noticed my neighbor had a stack of old louvered bi-fold doors sitting by their garage. I asked what they were doing with them and learned they were heading to the dump. Well now like they say,
one person's trash is another person's treasure and I struck gold!
When Mr. Frugalista came home and asked,
"why the heck is there a bunch of old bi-fold doors leaning against our tree?" I got the ole eye roll when I told him that we were going to build a
DIY garden screen from those repurposed louvered bi-fold doors.
DIY Garden Screen From Repurposed Bi-Fold Doors
Like the infamous junk drawer, we have the junk pit. It's a very useful and functional pit because it houses our firewood pile, extra garbage cans for yard debris, and the list goes on. No matter how organized we try to keep it, it is still an unsightly mess that can be seen from the deck.
Here is where my neighbor's louvered doors to the rescue. The stack of blocks under the tarp is a sneak peek at our next project.
The first order of business was removing the hinges from each set of doors. Peek-a-boo says the reluctant photo bomber.
The next step was using a post hole auger to dig post holes (make sure you have the area flagged for utility lines before doing this step).
I forgot to take a picture this is the step where I went inside...BORING.
The next step was a breeze, measure and screw the bi-folds in place onto the back of the posts. Sounds simple enough but you should have heard the arguing back and forth about the silly knobs on the doors. Mr. Frugalista could not understand why for the life of me I would want the knobs exposed...
their knobs for crying out loud! I on the other hand argued that they added a decorative element to the doors and gave them character. As you can see from the picture below, I won!
...and onto the next section.
After the bi-folds were attached in all three sections.
We had to get a little creative with the last section because we only had two bi-fold doors left. Considering this section was angled we decided to make the difference look intentional while using the same building materials.
The original plan was to install dense lattice between each bi-fold (which we also got from our neighbor) but the pattern was competing with the louvers. So we went with cedar fence boards which hide the mess even more. I must say going with this choice was much easier to install, just like the bi-folds they were screwed onto the back of the posts.
Now, this is where Mr. Frugalista ditched me and got outta Dodge. I spray painted the doors a moss green.
Then I stained the posts and fence boards with a semi-transparent Natural Cedar color stain.
I wanted to install decorative fence post caps but Mr. Frugalista didn't like that idea. So while the cat was away the mouse did play.
I picked these cute wood birdhouses up at Michaels and played with some paint while enjoying the glorious and long-awaited sunshine.
After two afternoons of elbow grease and some much needed time in the sun, no more unsightly wood pile viewed from the deck.
We live in a cold climate where we can still get snow in May so our growing season is short. To help get our veggie garden planted early we built the budget-friendly
DIY raised garden greenhouses seen in front of our bi-fold door privacy screen in the photo below.
We also used old bi-fold doors to build a
deck privacy screen.
