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Have you always wanted uninterrupted garden views and easy access to the outdoors? Find out if sliding wood door installation could be the answer. With increasingly thinner frame profiles and advanced runners offering a smoother opening, modern sliding doors are fast becoming the best option to allow a closer connection to your garden or patio. Whether you’re building a new extension or just want to upgrade your existing patio doors, read on for all the information you’ll need about sliding doors.
Why choose wooden sliding doors?
Compared to bifolds, which subdivide the glass multiple times and require stacking space when open, sliding doors are much neater. If it is more than four meters wide, we recommend sliding doors.
What are the size options?
The width of a sliding door ranges from 0.8m to 3m. Height also has an impact: if the glass is very tall, it cannot be that wide. You must also consider the weight. An automated opening system is recommended for doors over 600 kg.
What material is the best?
The most affordable option is UPVC, but it is not too strong so the frames will be quite thick. Wood is a classic choice. Choose hardwood or engineered wood if your budget allows. If you choose softwood, make sure there is a decent warranty. At the higher end, you can buy frameless structural sliding glass, but you will need very deep pockets!
Are there color options?
Wooden sliding doors can be stained, varnished or painted, usually in any color.
How about the fit?
In order for wooden sliding doors to slide smoothly, it is important that the walls above do not transfer any weight to the door frame; A steel support beam may be required in wide openings. The floor also needs to be solid, to keep the tracks straight and level. Lift and slide glides with heavy duty bearings are preferred. Good wood
Triple glazing
Sturdy design
Thin frames
Sliding wood doors can be a great addition to any home because they offer so many benefits. When placed in the correct areas of your home, they offer comfort and style to make your home truly unique. Are sliding doors perfect for your home? Take a look at this list of benefits to see if they are worth investing in.
Where should the sliding doors be installed?
You may have noticed that wooden sliding doors generally tend to be placed in kitchens and other rooms that lead to the backyard or patio of a home. This is because these areas tend to receive a lot of foot traffic. Since the door retracts into a slot, there is more room for people to move around.
Natural light
Wood sliding doors allow in more natural light than other types of doors. Due to the large pane of glass often found on these doors, the amount of light that can be left in a space is significantly greater than a standard overhead door. You can always add blinds for times when you want to keep the light in or add a little privacy. Wood sliding doors have oversized glass panels that extend from the top to the bottom of each door panel. This design maximizes natural light, ensuring you can enjoy bright interiors all day long.
Easy access
Sliding doors are easy to use – just slide them along the track. They offer quick and easy access to common use areas such as patios and backyards. This is especially useful when entertaining guests during a barbecue or pool party.
Similarly, given the fact that wooden sliding doors are twice the size of regular doors, this also means that you can move furniture and other large objects much more easily. This also means that you will be much less likely to remove paint from the wall or cause unnecessary dents in the process while doing it.
Sliding wooden doors move easily on their rails – to open these doors, you need to gently push them to the side to open. This offers easy access to outdoor areas, which is especially useful during the hot summer months.
Better flow between inner and outer health
Sliding doors make living outdoors much more accessible (and visible), giving you the opportunity to feel like the outdoors is at your fingertips. In fact, studies show that even looking at nature has the ability to reduce negative emotions, such as anger and fear, while increasing pleasant emotions. In turn, this improves our physical health, including blood pressure, muscle tension, stress, and anxiety.
Including sliding doors in your home can be a smart move due to its many functional and design advantages.
Sliding doors have oversized glass panels that extend from the top to the bottom of each door panel. This design maximizes natural light, ensuring you can enjoy bright interiors all day long.
Sliding doors make it easy to enter the outdoors by creating a seamless flow between the exterior and interior spaces of your home. As the sliding doors have large glass panels, they offer year-round views of your garden landscape and panoramic views beyond. Sliding doors provide a simple, elegant look that blends in with most architectural styles.
Energy efficiency
Sliding doors can be efficient insulators, ensuring that your home stays warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Sliding doors that are equipped with composite gaskets offer optimal thermal insulation, which effectively acts as a barrier against weather and sound, and prevents dust, drafts and rain from leaving the house.
Security
In the past, sliding doors earned a reputation for being dangerous because they were not always installed with safety glass. Today, however, all this has changed: homeowners can now get sliding doors with shatterproof safety glass. Safety is an important consideration when investing in sliding doors. Residential property owners should look for sliding doors with built-in gaskets, aluminum seals, and fixed leaves where these items are found. In addition to the seal, look for a hook-and-loop locking mechanism that prevents the sliding leaf from lifting off its frame. Sliding doors move easily on their rails – to open these doors, you need to gently push them to the side to open. The secure sliding doors also offer stiles designed for added stability, creating a bridge between your indoor sanctuary and the great outdoors.
Retrench of space
Sliding doors operate without a hinge, they simply slide along a track instead of opening. This means that no additional space is required for the door arch because they simply open through a door that slides over another panel.
Respectful with the environment
Some sliding doors have ecological characteristics. For example, homeowners can get sliding doors made of wood that is renewable, durable, and acts as a good insulator.
Great glazing
Sliding wood doors are a huge plus for parents, they offer unrestricted views of the outdoor areas of their home, allowing parents to keep an eye on their children.
You can choose glazing for your sliding doors that offers a number of practical benefits, such as reducing harmful UV rays by up to 98 percent. Energy efficient glazing can prevent energy loss as well as provide better sound insulation and reduce frost and condensation on the glass.
Style
Installing sliding doors adds a stylish aesthetic to any home. They provide an elegant and simple look that harmonizes with most architectural styles, as well as being an incredibly functional and practical design that maximizes natural light, outdoor views and offers simple functionality.
A pair of double sliding doors can also act as a perfect room divider, especially within a contemporary design property.
Types of sliding doors
Pocket slide systems are the most popular and have fire rated options available. They are also the best space saving option as they slide into a pocket or pocket in the wall.
Wall mounted sliding doors are more popular as glazed screens, but they can also be engineering doors. These face systems are attached to a wall finished with a layer covering the top hung track. They require a wall section large enough to allow the door to slide over it when pushed to the open position, a much more practical option in larger rooms where wall space is not an issue.
The best tips for installing sliding doors
There are many different types of skid systems available. I always recommend using a top hanging system with a floor mounted guide pin located inside the pocket. This eliminates the guide channel that can sometimes go through the floor with some systems that only fill up with dirt and start to jam the door while operating. Not to mention the nightmare of having to bury it in the ground when installing. If you have the option, have a solid door design (solid = not glazed) with a horizontal pattern / design over a vertical pattern / design. This is highly recommended if you cannot determine an accurate measurement of the finished visual opening at the time of ordering as it will give you the tolerance to make the visual opening any size you want when you come to install it and the door will still be visible centered when in the closed position.
Try to avoid doors with flanged panels that stick out like sliding doors. The reason for this is that it becomes difficult to install and obtain fire ratings (if necessary) due to the projection of the heel, which makes the total thickness of the door 45mm to 75mm. Sometimes even thicker with some of the available beads! This also makes it difficult to finish the frames as they can only finish to the edge, leaving the frames 10-20mm away from the door jamb when in the closed position (depending on the type of edge). You can solve this by using a recessed trim that allows you to have a paneled design, but still maintains all of the important thickness of the door.
Or while it may seem like a cleaner finish, having a sliding door fully closed in a pocket so that the edge of the door is flush with the frame is not recommended. The main reason for this is that the recessed handle at the front of the door, which is required to close the door, can easily hook little fingers when it is slid open in the pocket.
It is very popular to have developers developed around the sliding door to avoid the use of frames and architraves if you don’t want the opening to look too busy. However, this requires a very experienced plasterer for this finish to look as good as it sounds. This type of finish also makes it very difficult if you need to adjust the door in some way in the future, which brings me to my next point.
A sliding door is something you want to install for the first time and not have to touch it again until it needs to be removed for renovation. When a hanging door is easy to adjust if it does not close properly by adjusting the undercut or hinges, a sliding door will require the surrounding frames and architraves to be removed or even a hole in the wall to get into the pocket if it is not. working correctly. It is not easy to put it back on a wallpapered wall.
You cannot accurately install the surrounding / revealing frames around a sliding door without the door leaf being installed and adjusted first. Keep this in mind when selecting finishes, as any plaster paint, oil, etc. It should be done after installing the door. However, as long as the door leaf is sufficiently protected or masked, this should not cause much of a problem.
