My main hall closet is parallel and flush to the corridor. It has two, heavy*, six panel doors that hang from above on an overhead track. The doors slide past each other with a tight tolerance. At the floor, front and center, is a guide to prevent the doors from “floating” - ie, holding the doors perfectly parallel to the corridor so they do not swing outward (perpendicular to the track) when gliding along the track. The right, rear wheel (ie, the furthest wheel on the rear of the two doors that is impossible to access) came off the track, thus staring this whole mess. The only solution I know is to take off the front door to access the rear door (otherwise, the front door will always block that rear wheel, not granting one a handhold to grip the rear door and “pop” the rear wheel back on the track.)
The conundrum is this: I got the rear door back on track - no problem - because one is not fighting any obstruction AND the rear door did not come out of the “guide” (as mentioned) at the floor, front and center. The guide has an inch (or so) of plastic sticking up in two places creating two channels to restrict each door’s motion to only a parallel motion along the track.
Th front door is harder (with both wheels off the track). My teen daughter needed access to the closet, and in her impatience, she pulled the front door out of its channel. This is a very difficult feat as the door would have to be lifted up and over the guide. But, there is little tolerance at the top where the track is (hidden behind a valence). I wish I could have witnessed how she managed this!
Anyway, how do I get the door over the guide with such tight tolerance at the top? I can’t get the wheels back on track until I get the door over the guide, but I can’t get the door over the guide!?!?! HELP!
WHAT’S THE TRICK?
*Why do they make the closet doors so heavy; yet, our six-panel bedroom doors are hollow? :smh:
If they are like any sliding doors that I’ve had, there is room in the top channel for you to lift the wheels over the lip of the track. Otherwise how would the installers have…installed them?
Do the wheels have screw type adjustment? Usually you can screw them in/out to get the perfect fit. The solution would be to screw them in for a smaller opening, then once in the channel, screw them back out to normal height.
The only, rather unhelpful, thing I have to offer is the same thing (if I’m visualizing the OP correctly) happened to a closet in my house. I’m usually pretty handy around the house, but I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure it out, but couldn’t see how the door could get back on the track, nor how it got off in the first place. Eventually I unscrewed the central guide plate from the floor, fed the doors through it, and screwed it back in.
I’ve unscrewed the foot guide from the floor, hung the doors on the top tracks, then reinstalled the foot guide. IMO that’s the far easy way.
It is LOTS easier to get the wheels at the door tops onto the top track when you can angle the doors outwards so although the door’s top edge is parallel to the track, the panel is not vertical; instead the bottom edge is 1 or 2 feet out into your room or corridor, not hanging straight down.
That’s also how you easily remove the doors if they’re tracked correctly but you need to remove them for cleaning, painting, etc. Do this …
Remove the foot guide from the floor, angle the front door out into the room, then lift it and both wheels will come easily out of the track. Then set the front door aside and do the same to the rear door: angle the bottom out into the room and lift the wheels easily off the track.
Reassembly is the opposite. In fact if the back door ever comes off the track, it’s probably easier to remove the front door as described above, re-track the back door the same way by leaning it out, and then re-track the front door than it is to try to fight with banging on the back door’s wheels to try to force them into the track while vertical. That feels like one step backwards to do two steps forwards, one of which you just created extra for yourself, but trust me, it’s the easy way.
The whole system is designed to make getting a wheel into the track while the door is vertical roughly impossible so it’s equally roughly impossible to knock them off the track in the first place.
That’s the way I’ve done it. Not often for closet doors, but all the time for shower doors before I replaced the top wheels with ones that didn’t come loose all the time.
It would be good to have a helper or two to lift the doors.
How are the wheels on the top attached to the door?
I’m imagining it as 2 wheels in a little frame, with the frame screwed into the door, and the wheeled mechanism attached with a threaded bolt onto the top of the little metal frame.
Those threads have a nut that allows adjusting the length of the visible part of the bolt, and thus adjusting how low the door hangs from the little metal frame. Turn the nut with a wrench, and the door will be raised a tiny bit .
Maybe.
Or maybe not…
Sometimes ya gotta call a pro.
OK, we took out the center guide, and with a struggle, we got both closet doors back on track. However, now the guide will not slip back in place. We’re just ging to leave it off. The doors want to swing out, so we have to handle the closet dors with kid gloves. (Also, to answer my question abou the guide: It hit me like a ton of bricks that the plastic piece on the guide could be pulled outwards, but it cannot be pushed inward without blocking the open space where I need the door to pop in place - had I not removed the guide. So, my effort to try and push the door inwards was self-defeating.)