Daily Archives: Saturday, 21 January, 2006

Lure Poupoune through the pet door, with sweet words and doggy treats. It doesn’t come naturally, but she’ll learn, smart dog as she is.

Our kitchen is very cold. Well at least, when it’s cold outside. And it should be cold, but isn’t. Last week it rained a lot, and one day it was freezing rain and that brought life in Montréal almost to a standstill. I read that parked cars slid down a hill downtown, and many people broke or sprained ankles, hips and wrists. I just stayed inside.

But in the almost hypothetical case that it gets cold outside, like in real winters, our kitchen also gets very cold. Especially when I open the kitchen door to let the dog out to pee (only Poupoune, Pepe is too much of a wimp to go out when it’s cold), a big flow of cold air comes in and a lot of hot air, heated with expensive fossil fuel, gets out. Not good.

So I decided to make a sort of airlock. Because of space constraints it had to be made outside on the porch, but not completely at the end or you would fall off the stairs when you go through the door. I found the door on the sidewalk, left out for the garbage collection, just the day after I decided to build this airlock. Apparently a neighbour changed their kitchen door. That was a couple of weeks ago, but it took a while to install. Initially I bought the wrong nuts for the bolts and getting the right ones took a bit of effort. Ah well, excuses.

Anyway, I got them, and installed the door while it was getting cold outside, and when, at last, the rain turned into snow again.

I also put in a pet door, but we still have to teach Poupoune to use it. Not and easy task since she is notoriously timid of new things, especially metal ones.