We have 4 bifold doors in our place. We hate them. So am wondering can they be upgraded? To be clear, it’s the rickety mechanism we most dislike in bifold doors, not the style of the doors. Are there “industrial grade” tracks, etc. that can be swapped in? Sliding doors won’t work, I assume, as there isn’t enough room to slide them out of the way, but is there another option?
Perhaps french closet doors are for you? I believe you can get them in narrow widths.
I don’t like them, and they usually aren’t used for closets, and they require a lot of wall space next to the closet, but a barn door might be an alternative, it sits outside the closet and when it slides open it covers the wall next to it. When it’s open you have access to the entire closet.
There are also pocket doors, but that is a much bigger project. I was lucky to get my pocket doors in as part of a remodel.
What are the sizes of the door openings?
Pocket doors are the cat’s ass, IMO. It seems like builders should have evolved to the point where all new construction uses them, and they operate as they do in Star Trek.
When I met my current wife, her house had crappy metal bi-fold doors in the spare bedroom. They went floor to ceiling. I removed them, built a filler for the top 18" and installed cheap sliding doors. The only problem was trying to put sheet rock on the upper filler, it looked like crap. I took it all down and installed some bead board instead. I painted it to match the walls and it looked pretty spiffy. When we sold the house, the buyers loved the look with bead board. That and a brand new kitchen from Ikea sold the house. Accepted an offer $15,000 over asking.
Bifolds can be converted to French doors that use a magnetic closure at the top.
I have replaced some closet doors with curtains, cotton tapestries even a sarong.
Just made life easier quieter more colorful.
Many good ideas here! Will measure doors a little later. Thanks, everyone
Testify!
One of the previous houses we were renting had a closet opening of about 6 feet with two mirror doors that hung from a track and slid past each other. Made the room feel larger (and brighter).
Anyone watching Fixer Upper? Does Joanna have an unhealthy fixation with barn doors, kitchen islands and shiplap?
Or just a limited bag of tricks?
We had a whole wall of that, must have been 10 feet with three huge heavy mirror doors. I hated it. The first thing we got rid of when we remodeled.
Opinions - everybody’s got them. We went with the sliding mirror doors on all the closets and pantry to replace crappy folding pieces. I used the the old folding doors (hollow core with one side having decorative patterning) as shelving in the garage. Some doors were kept hinged and placed on sawhorses as extra tables for large get togethers. Win.
Mirrors made the rooms look larger and brighter. Not to everyone’s taste. “How do you keep them all clean?” With all our grand and great-grand children - takes some work.
When I was adding a bedroom in the basement, and talked with the contractor about getting a door for the closet, he said “why do you want a closet door? Nobody ever uses them.” So I went around to the other 3 bedrooms in the house, and in every one the closet doors were wide open. And clearly long-term; in two of them there were things hanging from the doors. So we built that closet without doors, and it’s worked fine. So you might reconsider if you need a door at all.
About pocket doors: make sure that you get hardware that is very good quality (if they still make that anymore), because they can be very difficult to repair. The house I grew up in (built in 1948) had 3 of them built in. But only 1-1/2 of them still worked 50 years later, and repairing them would have involved tearing out a lath-and-plaster wall to get at the mechanism, and then repairing & repainting afterwards. Something we were never willing to do.