Using milk doors for vintage remodeling

**Jon** · Dec 21, 2016, 12:53 PM

I'm sure many people have seen these before on older homes, but I saw a discussion of a house renovation online, and was reminded of their potential for people doing house remodeling, building cabins, or just repurposing vintage materials.

A milkman would regularly deliver milk to the milk box, using the outer door. A housewife would open her separately locked side of the milk box from inside the house, and retrieve the milk, cream, dairy products, eggs, or even packages.

The original milk doors are still around, either already installed in older homes, or even available on eBay.

Some houses brick them in or cover them up, but the nicer doors have good potential.

Functionally, they can be modified for use as mailboxes, kitchen spice cabinets, or breadboxes. Installed next to a stove, they could act as warming drawers. In an outdoor grilling area, they would make excellent facades for built-in coolers. Slightly more difficult, but this would be an excellent door for a beverage refrigerator. Rat rodder? Here's your glovebox door or center console.

If you're lucky, you'll even have one of these "dairy wheels", that someone would use to indicate their order to a milkman. This is great decor, or even a viable candidate for a kitchen clock face. Another stretch here, but the dairy wheel would make a great basic lock. Set one adjustable hand to 1/2 pint whipping cream, another to 1 dozen eggs, and another to 2 quarts raw milk, and the door opens up. With 23 different options and 3 different hands, the dial below would give you 23³ possible combinations (12,167). You might not lock your front door like this, but it would work nicely to secure a small beer refrigerator.

Using these as shop workspace storage is probably a bit much (although the older library card catalog systems are viable candidates for a fastener storage system). Still lots of options here for creative repurposing if you like the aesthetic and history of that era.