{small Home/ BIG Ideas} Turn A Bifold Door Into a French Style Door

Woo hoo! Tomorrow marks Simplicity In The South's one month old birthday! Today, I'm bringing you part two of the Small Home/ Big Ideas Series. I'm sharing budget friendly ideas to make your small home more functional while adding character in the process. Back in the day, before Pinterest and Houzz,

my main source of house-eye-candy was Decorpad. This is where I had originally gotten the idea to change the bi-fold doors to our laundry room to open up like a set of french doors.

 Some might ask, "Why go through the trouble?" Well, after countless hip bruises from bumping the laundry basket into the door and a couple of pinched toddler fingers, we needed to nix the doors, or change them up. I chose the latter. That was back in 2009. So, despite our youngest two active hyperactive boys running in the laundry room to hide and slamming the doors behind them, the doors have held up well. And no pinched fingers...thus far. But nothing changes the fact that I'm a klutz and may run into doorways at any given moment, but at least I have an extra half foot of clearance!

 I used the original hinges. 

At the top of the door, magnet latches help hold the doors shut. You can find these in the knob and hinge section of the home improvement stores.

Since there is an inevitable gap between the doors when they are closed, I had to add a 1" wide wooden lattice strip along the edge of one of the doors.

This has worked out so well that we decided to do the same for our master bathroom.

We took down the hollow core door and replaced it with a pair of bi-fold door panels that I found at the Habitat For Humanity. The old hollow core door opened into the bathroom, taking up what little space we have. It also covered up the mirror that you see on the right side. I use this mirror all the time to see the back of my head when I'm fixing my hair.

Now that I can actually SEE the back of my head when I fix my hair, I can prevent this from happening....

Note to self: Check hair before leaving the house.

 The Alfalfa sprout is only cute on Alfalfa.
I'd like to send out a big thank you to Remodelaholic for featuring my laundry room reveal as one of their favorite links from last month's Laundry and Mudroom Linkup!

I'm linking this up to these fabulous blogs: