French, Garage, Shower Door – Buy Doors and Installation

Sliding doors are more common in usage with patios and external doors, although can be used in other areas of the home. For stylish reasons, sliding doors can be installed between rooms and different areas of the house equally in place of regular stand alone doors. Of course, they require more room in order to install than traditional doors but can bring aesthetic benefits to the table. But with sliding doors, it’s important to check all of the features are in place in order to ensure the door is as functional as possible.

Choosing Your Sliding Doors
Before you can choose a particular sliding door you must first understand the positioning of the door within your home, namely whether or not you’re looking at an internal or external door, in order to determine what kind of fittings you will require and what your space requirements will be. Next, you want to ensure that the kind of door you choose is correctly weighted for your requirements – internal sliding doors should be lightweight enough to be moveable whilst outer doors should be somewhat more robust to protect from the heat and foreign invaders.

Sliding Door Handles and Fittings
The handles for your sliding door must be robust enough to carry the weight of your door, whilst also matching up with the remainder of your household fittings for design and style reasons. Likewise it is important that the handles are firmly fixed to the door in order to enable you to open and close the doors with ease without the handle coming off in your hand.
Few people consider that sliding doors require runners – however, this is a vital component for the slide mechanism to work, and something that must be catered to differently depending on the specifics of the particular unit you’re looking at. For example, an outer sliding door will require a heavy-duty runner located at the foot of the door in order to ensure it is effective at opening and shutting. However for an internal door, it’s probably best for the runner to be located above the door itself to avoid creating uneven floorspace when the door is opened.

Considerations for Sliding Doors
* weight – easy enough to open/heavy enough to keep out the elements?
* fixtures – robust enough to allow you to take the weight of the door?
* runners and location – are the runners in the right place and unlikely to cause problems?