Category: Home repair

For some reason part of the intake for the central air is behind a door in my house. It’s a louvered door, which you’d think would be enough to supply airflow…but all it seems to do is collect dust. Have you ever tried cleaning between all those slats?!?! Not to mention if you happen to have the door in your hand when the a/c kicks on, it has enough suction to pull it out of your hand!

Since this summer is even hotter than last summer (high 90s for most of august with feel like temps in triple digits), I decided that I’d do something to try and reduce whatever stress on the main unit I could. Considering how much work it’s doing to pull the air in, removing the door and figuring out another way to cover the opening was one idea. So, door was removed. Pretty easy for interior doors, you just pop out the pins (carefully).

Then I had to decide…I didn’t want to leave just the opening there because there are bulky items (crockpot, pressure cooker, cooler) stored there and cubbies on the walls with lightbulbs etc. Screen door? Well, that would mean building another door and trying to match the paint…plus there’s the matter of the hinges. I didn’t want do anything that I could not easily reverse later, and changing hardware is hard when you have to match up styles that are older than me!

One shower later…aha! Beaded curtains!! Wouldn’t restrict the airflow, would only require a cup hook or two, and can’t be that expensive…right? Right?

So over to amazon I clicked. Andddd got some nice sticker shock! You want a $40 beaded curtain? You’re getting strands of…embroidery floss it looks like. Read the reviews and easily tangled strands of floss, plus they don’t hide anything at all behind it, not even a little. So I set my sights a little higher and…$150?!?!?! Too high too high! That’s “new door” territory (me building)!

Finally I found one for under $70. They had a bunch of different designs too…and it looked like there were enough beads and strands to actually block some of the view.

I was a bit concerned about how light the color looked , but decided to give it a try. The fact that it was painted like the very door that used to be there I found funny.

Color me impressed! It actually looks better in person than the picture showed online by far, and is close enough to the wood color of the house. And when you’re walking by it, you don’t see a lot of the things behind it. First picture has some sort of mist to it (phone camera was dirty) but you get the idea.

Head on view (please excuse the mess):

Handful of the beaded strings for size-they are narrow tubes but they were all there. It’s made out of bamboo but still had some weight to it. I used the included cup hooks to hang it…I originally intended to hang it with a curtain rod inside the doorframe but I either measured wrong or read the wrong width somehow and it had to go outside the frame.

I’m very pleased and after seeing it I understand why the prices are so high! No idea how they paint each bead in the round like that, someone is talented that designed the equipment to produce this! I would’ve bought another one but they went out of stock :(.