Types Of Sliding Doors For Homes

One of the most important components of any home is the sliding doors that lead to the outdoor part of the house. Whether it leads to the pool area, backyard, or porch, your home needs a solid sliding door that functions well and matches up to the general look of your home. Not all sliding doors for homes are the same, and getting one installed sight unseen or according to trends you may have been following is not always a good idea. A better idea would be to explore the different types of sliding doors for homes that exist, then choosing which one is best for you. If you do this, your sliding door will last much longer and you will not need to replace it, which can happen if you get one installed sight unseen. Before exploring the various types of sliding doors for homes, it is first a good idea to understand exactly why you would ever need to get one installed. You can then work from these reasons to familiarize yourself with the various types of sliding doors that exist so that you can be sure that you made the right decision.

Situations Where You Would Need A Sliding Door

Understand that only certain sizes of homes are even capable of having a sliding door installed. You may think this is obvious, but there are a lot of situations where homeowners think they can get away with installing a sliding door only to realize that not only was it not necessary, but it is actually now a burden. How can sliding doors in a home be a burden? First of all, they cost a lot of money and time to get installed. If you want to get a sliding door installed in your home, make sure that it is something that you know you need, not something that you think will be convenient. The concept of function versus convenience with sliding doors for homes will be explored later on as this is a very important thing to consider when selecting a sliding door for your home.

Another thing that can make a sliding door a burden is maintaining the locks and the tracks that it contains. These are small parts, and they are nothing if not imperfect. If something happens to these locks and tracks, they will need to be repaired and this can also take a good amount of time and money. Simply put, you need to understand which sliding doors are designed for the interior of your home, which ones are designed to connect to the exterior, and what kinds of sacrifices you are willing to make to install each. One thing you should know is that a sliding door for a home should focus on function over convenience. This is a major rule of thumb that you should follow when deciding on a sliding door of any kind for your home.

Sure, it may be convenient to insert a sliding door to your living room, den, dining room, or any large room within the home, but how useful will this be in the long run compared to the cost and potential maintenance that might be necessary? This is why most sliding doors should only be built when you have an outdoor portion of the home that requires it. A sliding door that leads to the backyard or pool area is ideal because it is much easier to travel to and from these areas than it would be with a standard door. Now that you have an understanding of the difference between the convenience and function of a sliding door for your home, it is time to explore the various types of sliding doors for your home. These sliding doors will be compared against each other in terms of how easy they are to install, how much they cost to install, and how easy they are to repair relative to where in your home you want to build it.

Interior Sliding Doors

Sliding doors that connect one portion of the interior of your home to another come in different forms and serve different purposes. As you will see, some of these purposes are useful, make sense, and almost seem necessary for a home and some of them appear almost as if they are a luxury and not necessary for a home at all. You will learn the difference as these types of sliding doors are analyzed and explored.

Closet Doors

These are by far the most common form of sliding door for a home, and many see them as absolutely necessary. Whether a closet door is necessary or not is usually related to the size of your closet. If you have a small closet, you may not find it so necessary. Think about it: If your closet is only four or so feet wide, is it really necessary to install a sliding door for it? The size of your closet is really the only thing you need to consider when it comes to installing a closet door or not.

Suspended Doors

This is where we enter the territory of using sliding doors to separate rooms. Suspended doors are a type of sliding door that are often installed for master bedrooms. If you feel like your master bedroom is too big to build a proper wall and standard door around, you can probably install a suspended door instead and you’ll be able to make good use of it. Something that you should be careful with when it comes to suspended doors is that they are similar to closet doors in that they are much smaller than the common sliding door. This means they are prone to coming loose and other issues. This is especially true if you know that you will go in and out of your suspended door a lot.

Barn Doors

Another door that is used to separate rooms, barn doors operate similarly to suspended doors in that they separate a large room from a smaller one. Think of barn doors as a cross between closet doors and suspended doors when it comes to size. They are generally too small for a closet, but not big enough for a room like a master bedroom or a den. Barn doors work well if you want them to serve as an entry to utility rooms, such as laundry rooms or even smaller bedrooms that you might be using for nothing more than a storage room. This is the only real function that they serve.

Swing Doors

Swing doors are different from other sliding doors in that they do not open and close horizontally like other sliding doors do. They open and close by swinging, which makes their design a combination of a sliding door and a standard door in some aspects. They install the same as most sliding doors in that they require a track to be set up on the top and the bottom of the door, which requires you to clear some of the wall to get the swing door ready for installation. The only real purpose for swing doors is aesthetics. They possess literally the same function as any given set of double doors, but they do look much more impressive than standard doors when they are installed to lead into a bedroom.

Bi-Fold Doors

Bi-Fold doors are almost exactly the same as swing doors, only that they are a little more thin, which allows traffic to flow to and from it more easily. One thing about bi-fold and swing doors that would actually ideal is that they let a lot of sunlight into the room that they are installed in. This is actually advantageous if you live in a cold but sunny climate as the sunlight can provide a little bit of natural heat for a room. Bi-fold and swing doors can accomplish this.

Room Dividers

The most complicated interior sliding door is the room divider. True to their name, this sliding door divides rooms, and they serve two purposes. The first of these is to partition space without sacrificing natural light. This is necessary for large rooms where you want to create different rooms without separating them with a wall and an additional door. A room divider will accomplish practically the same thing. Room dividers are also effective if you want to micromanage pets. Because most sliding doors are made of glass, you will be able to see what your pets are doing if they enter a different room if it is separated by a divider. If you separate the room with a wall and a standard door, you will not be able to see what the pet is doing.

Nearly all sliding doors that lead outside are room dividers as well. Room dividing sliding doors are ideal for anything that leads to a backyard or pool area because you will be able to see nearly everything that goes on outside. Those are the types of sliding doors that are available for your home. Now that you know the objective details about each one, you will be able to make a better decision on which of these you want to install in your home, if any.

What Else Do You Need To Know About Sliding Doors?

Understand that any given sliding door installs by utilizing tracks on the top or bottom of the door. The best quality sliding doors use tracks on the top and bottom, but most of the smaller sliding doors only use tracks on the top. If your sliding door only contains tracks on the top, this can be problematic: The door can become unbalanced, which can be a challenge, especially for closet doors and barn doors. Bigger sliding doors such as room dividers usually require locks. These locks use deadbolts that are much smaller in size than standard doors, so you will need to be very aware of how these work and what to do to fix them, because locks on room dividers are not perfect.

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Conclusion

Sliding doors for homes come in a lot of varieties, especially when it comes to the interior of your home. Most use sliding doors in the form of a room divider to separate the interior and exterior of your home, but when it comes to sliding doors for the interior of your home, it is wise to understand what kinds of sliding doors exist this way you can make better decisions on which ones to install. Sliding doors for the interior of your home can improve your home in many ways, but they can also be an inconvenience even if you intended for it to make things more convenient for you. Do all you can to learn about these sliding doors before deciding on which ones to install in your home.