Great is maybe overselling it a bit. And does it count as a conspiracy if I have been openly talking about doing this for months? The Moderately Interesting Cat Door Plan just doesn’t sound as good. Here is the situation. The previous owners of our house had cats. They adored these cats and gave them reign of much of the house. As such there are a number of cat doors around. Some are internal doors, some go from inside to outside (AC leaks!). On top of that there are two exterior doors that had intercoms. The intercoms are dead and gone which leaves a hole to fill.

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This was an example from an outdoor closet that housed a set of litter boxes. All doors had the same size and shape of hole. To fill it I got a wide board of PVC wood. It has a smooth side and a textured side that looks like wood grain. I am not sure how they make it, but the inside isn’t as dense as a PVC pipe. It has a closed cell foam kind of interior. Not structural strength, but good enough for trim and jobs like this. They probably have a reasonable insulation value too, which is handy for the exterior door.

I cut out a few blanks and got to carving away on the router. I was having so much fun working in the shop I forgot to take pictures.

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I used a wide router bit to rabbet around the edges so the blocks would fit inside the door and leave less than 1/4″ showing. That made them less obtrusive visually. The inside doors have a wood texture, so I put that side showing out and matched the grain orientation. The outside doors are smooth. Before installing I used my corner radius jigs to add a little round over to the 4 corners. I used white calking to glue each one in place and cover up any edge seams. Blue tape kept them in place while that dried.

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With all the cat doors taken care of I used what I learned to attack the outdoor intercoms. I didn’t think a round over would look nice here, but did take advantage of the wood grain. Same trick as before with some careful adjustment to get these to press fit in. I used a small amount of clear silicon to hole them in place in case I needed to pry them out for some reason. The side garage door is bare but has wiring for a future doorbell. The front door has one of those new fangled video doorbells.

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