Sun Room = Dog Room

We used to let the dogs have the run of the house when we weren't home. After a few incidents of Zoe getting into things she shouldn't we decided to make the sun room the dog's safe area. All of the sun room's entrances have doors, but the french doors don't have real handles so the room didn't really contain the dogs since smarty pants madeline has somehow learned over the years how to open unlatched doors (which sometimes really scares me when I'm home alone!). To fix this, we decided to add locks to the doors.

We got these sliding locks at Lowe's. They were a little pricy but they were what we needed to make this work. Nate notched out the wood so that the hardware sat nice and flush on the top frame and then added the locks to the doors.

Now no matter how much pushing on the doors Madeline attempts, she can't get the doors open. Unfortunately, this is how we get to the rest of the house from our bedroom so it meant that after Nate left for his early classes and left the dogs in the sun room, I was also locked out of the house. After this happened twice, we made this obvious switch.

Now we can get into or out of the sun room no mater what side we are on and the dogs are still locked in the sun room.

At first they really didn't like being restricted (despite their bed, food, water and toys all being in this room) but now they hang out in here even when we are home and the doors are open. The best part is, Zoe has not gotten into anything bad since we started doing this!