Sliding doors: when they are relevant and how to install them correctly

Recommendation points

• Why sliding doors are bad
• When installing a sliding structure is justified
• Features of mounting sliding doors

The main reason for installing sliding doors is space saving. However, this dubious merit fades under the pressure of a number of disadvantages. will tell you in which cases the installation of a sliding door is advisable, and in which it is better to revise the layout and shift the opening.

Why sliding doors are bad

The benefits and perceived advantages of doors with sliding fittings are strongly promoted by sellers for one simple reason – high cost and, as a result, higher sales revenue. At the same time, a sliding door can in no way be called a full-fledged door, if only because it does not perform the function of isolating a room when closed. The sliding door does not have a tight abutment to the opening, and therefore does not prevent the penetration of noise and odors.

The second significant drawback of sliding doors is frequent breakdowns and rapid wear of roller guides. Fittings of this type are a rather complex mechanism equipped with closers, stoppers, devices to ensure smoothness and noiselessness of the movement. All these elements quickly fail if handled carelessly: it is enough to push the door too hard at least once when opening it to jam.

One can argue with the indicated drawbacks by pointing out the imported sets of accessories that have a high service life, protection against impacts and special seals, but the cost of such door sets is two, and sometimes three times more in comparison with standard swing-type blocks. At the same time, such products cannot be found in regional retail outlets; they have to be ordered remotely, which entails additional costs and difficulties in resolving warranty disputes. By the way, the guarantee for the purchase of sliding doors is strictly required..

There are also practical and decorative disadvantages. The sliding door opening hardware is located not on the side, but on top of the door leaf. Because of this, the height of the door block is 5–7 cm higher in comparison with swing doors with a standard two-meter door leaf height. This is a real problem, because the doors are part of the decorative attributes of the interior, and the difference in their height causes an obvious dissonance. In addition, due to the handle, the door in the open position protrudes into the opening up to 10 cm, which reduces its useful width.

In modern renovation, the installation of a sliding door is carried out with the formation of a false wall, in which the open canvas is hidden. The false wall itself “eats up” up to 10 cm of usable space and requires additional costs for its construction. At the same time, all elements of the door hardware are hidden inside the niche, which causes another problem – extremely low maintainability. To replace faulty fittings, you have to disassemble and reassemble the false wall, for which you need to free the room from furniture, remove curtains and curtains, protect walls and stationary objects from dust, and in some cases dismantle the floor covering.

When installing a sliding structure is justified

And, nevertheless, sliding doors have not yet disappeared from stores, which means that their shortcomings can be reckoned with under certain conditions. Such situations, when the installation of a sliding door is really advisable, arise with planning errors when all four door opening zones are occupied by furniture, household appliances or plumbing. As a rule, this occurs when the door is placed in the middle of the wall, but if the doorway is shifted to a corner, at least on one side there is always a place for an open door leaf, because there is inevitably a passage area where it makes no sense to install furniture.

Another possibility for choosing in favor of a sliding door type is when complete isolation of one room from another is not required. This applies to dressing rooms or bathrooms adjacent to the bedroom. In this case, the purpose of the door becomes purely formal, it only interferes with direct eye contact, while the difference in the heights of the door blocks, as a rule, is solved by abandoning the upper platband or slope in favor of a false box.

The possibility of installing a sliding door is always associated with the possibility of constructing a niche in which this door is hidden. Otherwise, there is no gain in terms of saving space: neither furniture nor any household utensils can be correctly installed in front of the open canvas, and the level of sound insulation will be zero. At the same time, when closed, the upper platband protrudes away from the door, which looks ridiculous. And even this installation option may be unacceptable: dust accumulates in the cavity of the false wall, which is unacceptable if any of the living people suffer from allergies.

You need to know that in certain cases a sliding door can be a replacement for a swing door, albeit not complete. The configuration of the room and the layout dictate their own conditions, sometimes for the normal opening of the sash it is necessary to cut the width of the opening to 60-50 cm, which is extremely inconvenient. If the door is not formal, it is allowed to use sliding fittings, but of a special type. We are talking about imported products, including a low-speed movement mechanism, devices for pressing a closed canvas, as well as special multi-row brushes, which are only slightly inferior in sound insulation of a swing door. The disadvantage of such sets of accessories is one – the exorbitant cost, so it is always better to think repeatedly about the possibility of moving the opening closer to the corner or changing the layout.

Features of mounting sliding doors

The whole process of installing a sliding door can be divided into three stages.

The first is the assembly of the false wall with the formation of a pencil case under the door.The cladding is constructed up to the ceiling, but does not have to extend along the entire length of the wall. As a rule, a cabinet, a sofa is installed on the side of the opening, or a television area is organized, so you can set a fixed length of the false wall.

The design is standard – a frame made of a galvanized profile of a standard size of 50 mm with a single-layer plating of gypsum board 12 mm thick. The bottom guide profile is fixed to the floor in such a way that the net gap from the wall is equal to the thickness of the leaf plus 10 mm, while maintaining parallelism with the opposite wall. Further, using a plumb line, the marking is transferred to the ceiling, where the counter guide profile is attached. In both cases, the fastening is performed with a damper tape lining. After the installation of the guides, the rack profiles and additional jumpers are installed at the joints of the sheets. The frame is sheathed with plasterboard in the standard way after the installation of the sliding mechanism is completed, while it is better to trim from the end before installing the door and cut the edge using the rack profile as a stop.

The second is the design of the opening.It is carried out by analogy with the finishing of portals, the material can be either a special board, which comes complete with a sliding system, or standard extensions for interior doors. On the side of the wall where the door is located, a wooden beam is simply mounted with a counterpart of the locking system, on the reverse side, the adjoining of the portal finish to the wall is blocked by platband.

It is worth dwelling on the bar against which the closed door rests. It is better to paint it with dark paint in advance, and then firmly fix it to the wall so that a groove 20–30 mm deep remains in the open state. To improve sound insulation along the edges of the timber, you can glue door seals.

Third – installation of fittings and door hinge.With the help of special brackets, roller blocks are attached to the upper part of the door; if there is no groove at the bottom end for the flag stop, it is cut out with a hand mill. The rack-and-pinion guide is attached to the bar, closers, stoppers and other mechanisms are installed, then the entire assembly, together with the canvas, is attached through the bar to the wall. The whole process of assembling and hinging the door is described in detail in the instructions for the door hardware and may have slight differences depending on the manufacturer..