I am happy (and I’m pretty sure most of my visitors are too) to now be the proud owner of a toilet door! What a difference a door makes.
I have, however, learnt some important lessons and a few of them I wish I’d known well back in the planning stages! Here they are:
- Sliding doors save lots of floor space because they don’t open out, but they do take up wall space. Obvious, but still worth considering. I can’t put any shelves on that back wall above my fridge now. The door has to be there though, because…
- You can’t put a sliding door against a wall that has a light switch in it. Dah! I didn’t really have enough brain space to think about bathroom doors when I was planning out my lights and electricity. For a while there I think I was actually planning an open out door, so I never thought it would be an issue. The placement of my switches and power points deserve a whole post of their own, to be honest. Many lessons learned there too.
- Don’t be fooled into excessive excitement when your door opening is 770mm and they sell doors that are 770mm. You actually need a door that is BIGGER than your opening. Otherwise you’ll have a door that functions less as a door and more of a changeroom-ish curtain that doesn’t quite fill all of the gaps. Awkward.
- The bottom guide things are actually pretty important. But if you cut your door too short you may struggle to use them. I followed the estimated measurements that came with the packet, but I still cut my door too short. It shouldn’t be too hard to glue something back onto the bottom and make the guide fit, but I also kinda hoped I wouldn’t need one. Wrong again.
Another problem.
Now, I read the installation instructions. I read them meticulously and a number of times, I promise you. But I still had trouble when it came to hanging the door, and it was only luck (and a few extra pairs of hands and eyes) that meant I was able to get it on at all.
The sliding door system I bought was an enclosed track wall mount, meaning the track part of it looked a bit like this:
See those little wheelie hangers that run inside the track? Well the trick (or trouble) is attaching them to the door. They slide into the track first, and you attach the track to the wall. You attach the brackets to the top of the door, lift the door up to the wheel hangers and then screw the brackets to the hangers. Presto!
Small hitch. As you can probably tell from the wheel part of the hangers, these buggers roll around. They also have some wiggle room in the height of the track so it’s hard to hold the door up and screw the brackets onto the wheel hangers. Near impossible, one might say.
I don’t exactly have the answer to this problem, I was just lucky enough that with such a narrow door, I was able to take the wheels out of the tracks, screw them to the bracket on the door and then roll the whole lot into the tracks from the side. If you were installing the door in a tight corner, you wouldn’t have that luxury!
Someone tell me please, have I missed something obvious or is this just a problematic style of hanging door?