living with closed internal doors

[hyldemoer]

I read an article a while back on cultural observances and it mentioned that Europeans tend to use the doors inside their houses (keeping the doors inside their house closed, not just left open).

The article was in referrence to being prepared to knock or announce yourself some way before entering a room.
I was thinking, if a door is closed it makes sense to me to knock before entering but then how often are the doors inside my house normally closed?

The bathroom door is a no brainer.
If its closed, someone is probably in there.

We never close the door between the kitchen and the dining room.
The back porch door only gets closed when its cold enough for the heat to be on in the rest of the house.

We never used to close our bed room door unless we had company AND either someone was getting dressed, sleeping , or the room was a mess.
Then my husband caught the cats sleeping on his pillow and he started insisting we close our bedroom door to keep them out.

Until that happened though, if we had no guests in the house my bedroom doors were never closed, not even at night when we went to bed.

Is the custom of closing the doors between rooms more wide spread than Europe?
Is it still a custom in Europe?

[lixnaw]

Is the custom of closing the doors between rooms more wide spread than Europe?
Is it still a custom in Europe?

I suppose it never bothered you if someone said "i'll drive inn all your windows and doors!" It's rather worrying in Europe though, lucky you!

[jizeckx]

Is that why Jim Morrision went to Paris and never came back?

[chrisoff]

I live on my own but still close all my internal doors (all 3 of them). Partly out of habit and partly to keep the heat in each room (3 room flat, central hallway, although hallway is perhaps too grand a word, with a main door out to the communal area. The main door is poorly fitted and lets in a cold draft).

When I lived with my parents we tried to keep doors closed but it was pointless as the dog would just open them.

If you don't close the doors in America, why bother fitting them?

[TelegramSam]

I can't sleep in a bedroom with open doors, it's just a "thing" with me, but for the most part the rest of the house I live in is like that - the doors pretty much stay open. Not that there are very many of them anyway, it's a pretty open house anyhow. There used to be large double-doors between the living room and dining room years before my family moved in but they'd been removed ages ago and I can't imagine them being there.

[fearfaoin]

I live on my own but still close all my internal doors (all 3 of them). Partly out of habit and partly to keep the heat in each room

Most of the advice for central heating says to keep doors open so
that the heat can circulate and distribute evenly. Perhaps that's why
Americans got in the habit?

We have doors so that we can close them if we need to, but in my
family, and my wife's, we only closed them if there was a reason,
we left them open otherwise. If you see a closed door, you knock
because there's a reason it's closed. If we left the house for the
day, all the interior doors would be open.

[emmline]

If you don't close the doors in America, why bother fitting them?

Sometimes you want them closed (confining a pet, reducing noise, etc,)
and sometimes you don't (free flow of air, easier access between rooms, etc.)
If you don't want them open, why not just have a wall?

[dwinterfield]

Our interior doors are all open except when we're regulating the behavior of the cat or dog. One bathroom door is always closed because the cat likes to pee in that tub. So long as that tub is not available his catbox behavior is entirely appropriate. We also close the bedroom door at night, keeping the cat out and the dog in.

[chrisoff]

I live on my own but still close all my internal doors (all 3 of them). Partly out of habit and partly to keep the heat in each room

Most of the advice for central heating says to keep doors open so
that the heat can circulate and distribute evenly. Perhaps that's why
Americans got in the habit?

Hmm, that seems fair enough. That's also possibly more of a concern in larger houses than in my pokey wee flat.

[Jayhawk]

This is an interesting little thread - my wife & I have a smaller house by current US standards (built in 1939 - 2 bedroom cottage with partially finished basement), yet we have 8 interior doors (should have been 9 but prior owners removed the door between the kitchen and dinning room) for various rooms...and that door count doesn't include closet doors.

Bedroom doors are closed at night, and my 8 year old son keeps his bedroom door closed all the time (so no person or pet can "mess with my stuff") but other than that we tend to keep them all open (as above, closed bathroom doors are highly meaningful). If we don't keep doors open, 3 of the doors would hinder the cat's progress to the litter box which would be bad, and a couple of the rooms don't have heating vents or have poor circulation so the doors need to be open to share warmth or AC with the neighboring room. In addition, since it's muddy again our bedroom door closes when we leave the house so the dogs don't pick their muddy feet on our bed ...I'm not so sure what's great about our bed and feet picking, but the dogs clearly have a preference for it.

Finally, my wife claims closing particular doors in the house when I'm playing flute, or especially whistle, greatly enhances her enjoyment of my musical interludes. What do you think she means by that?

Eric

[Redwolf]

We always keep our bedroom door closed because of the cat...Tony's allergic, so we can't have the cat in where we sleep. Now that we have a dog, it's doubly important...we don't have to worry about cat/dog spats while we're sleeping!

Even before we had critters, though, we always tended to keep our bedroom door closed. In my case, it probably comes from having grown up in a place that gets awfully cold in the winter...it saves on heat. The laundry room door is always closed to keep the critters from getting in there, but the bathroom doors are usually open unless there's someone in there.

Redwolf

[peeplj]

Oddly enough, before I was married, I used to keep the doors in my apartment closed.

This makes my wife feel very closed-in, so I've gotten in the habit of leaving all the internal doors open.

I also don't like sleeping in a bedroom with the door open; this took a lot of getting used to for me.

--James

[cowtime]

Let's see- 6 doors upstairs, 5 downstairs (one is that swinging door between the kitchen and dining room)(not counting closet doors here. None of them are closed unless we are going to bed, then we close the two doors to the den where the dogs sleep. Oh, and I have to close the french doors between living room and dining room when I play(played) the piano- it's dead now, but it's body is still in the dining room until I find it's successor. We never close the door to our bedroom when sleeping. I feel too confined with it shut. It would seem very strange to me to have doors shut inside the house.

[Cynth]

Our doors are normally kept open unless there is a reason---privacy, pets, heat, messes---to close a door. Unfortunately, many of them are blocked by junk or by things hanging on them so closing them would be quite a project. We have our bedroom door open unless we have company, and even then it has to be open a bit so the kitties can get in and out.

[Rod Sprague]

I had a room mate that kept closing the door to the bathroom. The humidity got too high, and it never aired out properly after it was put to its more odoriferous uses, so the room began to stink and get moldy. I asked why she didn’t leave to door open so it could air out properly. “Because bathrooms smell!” I also didn’t like not knowing if anyone was in there.