Hobby Skills in the Real World

Work and home life have both been crazy-busy the last few weeks, which has left me virtually no time for anything hobby-related. But in the whirlwind of packing, cleaning and generally getting ready to move inter-state, I have had a couple of opportunities to use my hobby skills.

Over the past two years of living in our house, our small dog has been working on scratching a hole through the laundry door. Most of the time she's fairly happy and placid, but then occasionally she decides that actually she doesn't want to be outside by her self while we're all at work.

Despite our best efforts to stop it, she's managed to inflict some serious damage to the door. This will probably surprise anyone who's actually met our dog, but she had managed to tear up a section that was about 10cm wide and 20cm tall, and dug almost half-way through the door.

Unfortunately, the pictures I took of the damage didn't come out, but this photo of after I'd filled most of the damage with wood putty should give you an idea of the area we're talking about. Basically, anything that's brown is what I had to patch up.

After the first lot of putty had dried, I went back over it with another layer to fill in any more gaps. I then scraped over the whole thing to make it level with the door, and sanded back the area to make it all seamless.
Then, through several trips to the hardware store, I was able to get a tin of paint that almost matched the door colour. Fortunately, the door is off on it's own, so it the colour was a little out it didn't matter too much. But I did have to paint the whole door.

I was pretty pleased with myself when it was all done - a few hours work (while I was doing lots of other cleaning), and it looked as good as new!

Then, not really thinking about it, we all went to work on Tuesday. When we got home, I opened up the back door and discovered this

Really, it should have occurred to me that this might happen. But I was pretty close to turning the dog into sausages.

So that evening I repeated the process. I filled in the hole with putty again, sanded it back, and then filled in any remaining holes before sanding it back yet again.

The I broke out the tin of paint again, and re-did the area. Fortunately I didn't have to re-do the whole door, since I knew the colour was going to match

The second time around doesn't look quite as good - if you look really carefully, you can see where the area was filled. But you probably wouldn't notice if you didn't know it was already there.

Now, every time we go out, I make sure the door is VERY well protected!