Doggie door flap, a Prettier Replacement using a Stencil

Replacing an ugly doggie door with a new flap and a pretty little stencil. A couple of years ago we moved our back door into the workshop so we could enclose a big closet and hallway to give us a third room on the main floor. This worked well for us as it gave Lodi a room for his hobbies and moving the back door into the workshop has been really convenient. If I have big projects, pieces of wood or tools etc. now I can just bring them to the back of the house and right on in to the workshop. Also, the back door is primarily used by our dogs with their doggie door in it, so any dirt they drag in primarily stays in the workshop which is our “dirtiest” room of the house anyway.

I’ve had dogs pretty much my entire life and we got over letting them in and out pretty quick when I was a kid… So I’ve almost always had a doggie door plus a big fenced in kennel.

(Call me spoiled but I would refuse to own a dog ever again without this arrangement. When renovating this house I literally designed in a kennel and a doggie door.)

Unfortunately though the past (and current) doggie door market is not only expensive but absolute TRASH.

There are almost no options.

I’ve tried all of them and they have all broken within just a few months or absolutely once we hit negative temps in the winter.

Now, don’t get me wrong, when I was going through the tiny range of doggie door options I also owned three 100+ pound dogs who used it heavily… But still!

So I headed to our local fleet store absolutely determined to come up with a DIY alternative.

And I did it!

AND IT IS AWESOME!

See how I made it out of mud flaps and magnets here.

After four years of use the first one I made finally got a little tear in the flap because the dogs always hit the door at an angle and not straight on. Ten minutes and $30 later and I simply replaced the flap.

When we moved the door from the hall to the workshop two years ago we replaced it with a solid steel insulated door and I went ahead and made a new doggie door then as well.

The doggie door has been great HOWEVER I ran into a little bit of snag…

Why is there a weird X painted on the doggie door?

So, I painted the door black awhile ago but then, I guess because the doggie door was also black, it apparently no longer existed even though our dog Annie had been using it for weeks… She had no problem using it to come back in but on the inside it was NO LONGER THERE.

She was so confused.

I was so confused.

(I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed harder at a dog in my life.)

So, I painted an X on it and BOOM, magically her doggie door appeared again and she was so grateful!

Ever since I’ve wanted to replace it with something that isn’t so ghetto looking but until I moved my office in here it just wasn’t a priority.

Well now I see it about every day and its been bugging me so I went looking and found this pretty little stencil.

I cut a new flap for the inside and then taped the stencil to the face of it after doing a little bit of measuring to make sure I centered it.

I also added plenty of tape to protect the flap from overspray.

I used Rustoleum’s 2X ultra cover spray paint which I’ve used a ton of times in the past and its always reliable.

After letting it dry about an hour (still sticky) I carefully pealed all the tape off and am pretty happy with how it turned out!

You can see where it bled a little bit into some of the finer lines but I think its pretty good.

Then I just had to replace it and what an improvement!