Month: October 2019

It’s Time to Redesign the Smallest Space in Your Home

Interior Design Trends

When it comes to getting life at least to some semblance of organized, many of us tend to focus on what’s in front of us — work, bills, our bank balance, the kids’ various schedules, auto maintenance, dinner schedules, etc. However, one of the most commonly overlooked aspects is an “accessory” of our lives that we use just about every single day.

Our closets.

Old, sliding mirror closet doors that constantly pop off-track never starts the day off on a good note. Additionally, no matter how large or small your closet is, if it’s ugly and messy to the point that it looks like a teenager’s bedroom, it can be next to impossible to find what you’re searching for.

Broken hanging closet doors and outdated and cluttered closets are the banes of both women and men around the country, yet instead of addressing it, so many seemingly opt to just live with the issue.

Here are 3 signs that it’s time to consider remodeling your closet:

Shelves / Racks Drooping — Whether it’s from excessive weight overload or you live somewhere that has a lot of moisture in the air, shelves that are bowing or showing signs of damage means it’s time to replace them. If you can’t use them or they’re subject to breaking, they aren’t doing you much good, are they?
Overflow — Opening your mirrored closet door to an avalanche of clothes is a sure sign that it needs your attention. Your closet remodels will give you a perfect opportunity to declutter and get rid of unused items. If you haven’t worn a certain item within the past 1 to 2 years, it’s probably time to get rid of it.
Damage — Yes, it’s “just” a closet. However, it’s a huge part of your daily life and broken closet rods, lopsided or mid-hung sliding mirror closet doors, and ugly cracks across the mirrored closet door can not only hinder the use of the closet, but they can also totally ruin the aesthetics of the entire room.

Closet Optimization

For points 1 and 2 above, a little sleuthing on Google will give you numerous DIY options. In the past few years, affordable, ready-made storage components have come a long way. Featuring better hardware, new finishes, and many even include accessories that were previously only available on higher-end solutions. This means that with a little work, your bedroom closet can look great and work like a professionally installed custom closet.

Before you replace those old hanging closet doors, you may want to consider one of these 3 built-in closet systems to help with those storage and organization issues.

Wire store system — This low-cost solution is a fixed wire system that easily installs using brackets and clips that support the framing and shelves. They come in fixed and adjustable wire options but another benefit is that they let you easily see belongings and by allowing air to circulate around them, they help keep clothes fresh.
Laminate storage system — Comes in 3/4” particleboard with a thermally fused Melamine resin coating. This option has a sleek, built-in look and offers a wide variety of drawers, doors, and finishes. However, this solution is usually about twice the cost of option 1.
Wire/laminate combo storage system — Combines the built-in look of a laminate system with the economy of wire systems. This is the second most costly option and it provides you with the sturdy support of wire shelving while the laminate tower provides the room and flexibility for accessories and expansion when needed.

Whichever option you select, you’re bound to be pleased with the improvement to that cluttered closet.

Top it Off in Style

Imagine a set of mirrored closet doors that enhance the style of your bedroom. Beautiful, yet durable. Today’s sliding mirror closet doors are the perfect way to save space while enriching your bedroom and punctuating your personality. Or, you can opt for a mirror in the middle and milky glass on both sides… the choice is yours with The Sliding Door Company’s vast selection.

With The Sliding Door Company and the tips above, you can give your closet a complete makeover in a single afternoon. We carry an exclusive collection of custom made, fully assembled modern closet doors. With various glass opacities, frame finishes, and decorative divider strips for style, you can create the closet that perfectly captures the feel of your room.

Our sliding mirror closet doors come in your choice of lightweight but sturdy 5mm thick tempered glass or 7mm laminated glass. Furthermore, The Sliding Door Company’s mirrored closet doors have the 3S Smart Shut System and our patented wheel to track the locking system.

3S has a slam proof damper that protects your loved ones from slamming doors while our patented wheel-to-track locking mechanism ensures that the easy-gliding wheels never dislodge from the tracks.

In other words, our sliding mirror closet doors have set the bar when it comes to quality and safety.

If mirrored closet doors aren’t what you had in mind or don’t fit your style, we have closet doors and barn doors that you may find more suitable. Our barn door options are a lighter, modern twist on the rustic classic and they quietly slide along a decorative rail to quickly close off the closet while still giving you easy access to everything inside.

With framed and frameless choices and custom build options for any size job you have in mind, The Sliding Door Company has exactly what you need to bring a little style to your organization efforts.

Even if this isn’t exactly the time to try and redesign the entire closet, our experts can help you select the perfect solution for your door replacement needs.

Visit our products gallery to see our complete line of solutions, contact us for a free consultation, or visit a showroom near you and find out how The Sliding Door Company can help your closet look great while fulfilling its true purpose in life.

3 Major Interior Design Mistakes to Avoid

Interior Design Trends

Working on the interior design of your home can be exciting and fun, but also complicated and even overwhelming at times. Your home is an expression of your personality and with interior design, you have a chance to create your very own sanctuary.

However, in order to design a home that you truly love, you need to know what not to do! Whether it’s simply adding elegant glass folding doors to your living room or completely revamping the entire home, this article will hopefully help you avoid making mistakes that can completely ruin the entire experience.

Mistakes are a part of life. We’ve all made them, some much more than others, and many of those mishaps turned out to be learning experiences and/or helped mold us into the fine person we are today. However, some mistakes are so everlasting that we should do everything we can to avoid them at all costs.

Especially when we can learn from the mistakes of others.

There are few among us today that would buy a house sight-unseen from an internet ad or that would accept cashiers checks for double the amount of an item for sale online. Why? Because plenty of people already made those mistakes and we now know better.

While interior design projects may not be as dramatic as getting ripped off online, there are still some mistakes that can stick with you for a long time.

So, let’s count down the top 3 interior design mistakes you should avoid.

Number 3: Impulse Buying

Just about everyone has fallen victim to a spur of the moment purchasing decisions that they later regretted. Redesigning the interior of your home involves multiple buying decisions and whether it’s due to excitement or a desire to “get it over with,” impulse buying should be done with care.

That antique beaded curtain may seem like the perfect replacement for those old fashioned partition doors, but you should probably keep the receipt just in case. Sliding wall doors and glass folding doors are so beautiful and stylish these days, they can completely transform the aesthetics of the room and eliminate permanent drywall barriers.

This doesn’t mean that you should bypass something that you really fall in love with, it just should go without saying that you should check return policies before purchasing.

Furthermore, have a budget and preliminary plan of action in place before you begin shopping. Measure the room and any doors you plan to replace, envision furniture and accessory placement, and select at least two showrooms and/or installers before making a final, educated, decision.

Buyer’s remorse is not a feeling you want to have to deal with during your interior design project, so always plan first and shop second.

Number 2: Let There Be Light

For most of us, there’s arguably nothing worse than living in the dark. However, when it comes to interior design, lighting is another aspect that is overlooked much more than it should be.

Room illumination has a huge effect on its tone and atmosphere. Adding additional lighting sources is one solution, but you should know that solely using overhead lighting can be a bit harsh. Table and floor lamps can offer a softer light source and you should consider adding a dimmer for the overhead lighting.

However, replacing old doors or non-load-bearing walls with suspended doors, bi-fold doors, or glass slidingroom dividers can completely transform your living space with lighting that showcases your lovely home. This type of interior design revamp gives you the ability to layer lighting like never before while adding a beautiful flair of style to your home. Additional benefits are that natural light is known to boost mood and even help people sleep better at night.

And the #1 Interior Design Mistake to Avoid is…

Scale!

Proportion is a mistake that all too many people make when it comes to interior design. The proper scale is a mixture of different shapes, sizes, and heights, so there’s a couple of things to keep in mind.

Putting too many small things in the room doesn’t provide the eye a place to land and gives the room an overall cluttered feel. Conversely, putting too many large, bulky items in a single room makes it look stuffed and smaller than it actually is.

If the room is too small overall, consider revisiting the number 2 section of this article. Adding additional light sources can help with scale perception, but, adding in glass room divider doors, space-saving stacking doors or suspended doors can completely open that space up and provide you with an entirely new roomwith no major construction needed. You don’t even need to leave the house for a minute.

With proper proportion and scale, your room redesign is well on its way to providing you the sanctuary you are shooting for while ensuring that you get the absolute most out of the space.

The Mistake Free Choice

Avoiding impulse buying, ensuring that your space has plenty of proper lighting, and keeping an eye on a scale will ensure that you don’t fall prey to the most common mistakes. When you work with The Sliding Door Company, you can evade all three of them from the word go.

We have 26 showrooms located throughout North America and you can schedule a FREE consultation in order to ensure that you can make the most informed purchasing decision possible. Furthermore, when it comes to lighting and scale, we have an impressive selection of interior door solutions that are unrivaled for their simple sophistication and refinement.

With the experts from The Sliding Door Company, you’ll get a partner that works with you to customize the perfect plan. From the consultation through selecting from our ample selection of frame designs, glass types, and hardware, to the installation of your custom room dividers,sliding interior glass doors, closet doors, storage enclosures or bi-fold doors, our experts will ensure that it’s mistake-free and perfectly suits your style and space.

Check out our design center to get ideas and see how various customizations will actually look, or contact us today for your free consultation. The experts at The Sliding Door Company are ready to help make your interior design ideas come to life.

6 Easy Steps to Transform any Room By Re-Designing the Closet Space

Interior Design Trends

A great way to better utilize a room is to better utilize its closet. It doesn’t really occur to homeowners that what’s in them could just be holding them back as unwanted items that really have no more relevance to them or their families. Interests, careers, hobbies, and projects may become abandoned, change completely or evolve into even greater things. Whether it is your home office or bedroom, you can update space so that it is more functional and enjoyable. It seems that each school year for kids requires new and improved tech and gear, so this is an opportunity to get rid of what is no longer necessary. You will elevate the quality of your life, and your children, by improving your surroundings, especially by de-cluttering. Take a “before” picture because you won’t be able to remember what it looked like once you are done.

Keep in mind that closet cleaning can be an evolution of sorts for you and your family, a work in progress that allows you to make space for your future, instead of your past. These basic steps will get you started and keep you on track in the face of the major decision making that involves rating past, current and future interests, and what you are willing to part with to make new space work for you.

1. Everything Out

The idea is to spend your money on what will be functional and pleasing to see. If all you need is a new closet door, The Sliding Door Company has a cost-effective and beautiful collection to choose from. If you want to tackle the entire closet while you are at it for an even greater impact on the utilization of the room, you can spend wisely on the door and with some purging and organization literally extend the use of the room.

Go to a liquor store and get some of their delivery boxes. These are the sturdiest and they are free! Empty the room completely- sorting into these boxes what is pretty and cool, what is absolutely necessary to keep because you have used it within the past 30 days, and stuff that needs to go somewhere other than back into that room. Do it with a time restraint or a friend to act as a voice of reason over the items you seem to have attached yourself to.

2. Remove the Existing Closet Doors

Closet doors are easy to remove and can be done using a simple screwdriver. Even the largest mirrored sliding doors are likely light-weight enough for one person to remove. Just pop the wheels off the tracks and get the doors out of the room. Now you have a blank canvass and you are now ready for the fun part. Notice at this point if the current tracking system is what you want. Visit slidingdoorco.com to get your imagination flowing as you get an idea of what style would complement your vision.

3. Paint

Remember, you are not buying new furniture. Just paint the room, because you are going to paint the inside of the closet, and most likely in a color that contrasts and compliments the color you choose for the room. If you are unclear as to how to proceed with color, take a few inspiration pieces, a layout on a cocktail napkin, a full-blown architectural schematic complete with dimensions, or anything in-between over to the experts at The Sliding Door Company who can show you what each of their options would look in the environment you are trying to create. You will be surprised at how good their design instincts are.

4. Change the Closet Doors

We have so many options to improve the look and utility of a room. It is worth the time to work with their experts to find the best solution for what you have in mind or help you to visualize options that they know are relevant to today’s tastes. Popular for hiding what is inside a closet now are Glass Sliding doors and Glass Barn Doors. The sleek and minimalistic styles of the collection at The Sliding Door Company of closet door solutions are simple enough to accentuate any architectural structure or design. Whether or not you want to leave your sliding door open to easily reach into a beautifully arranged closet, or leave it open just as visual interest for the room, you will find many choices with regards to the opaqueness and frame configuration to choose from to establish just the right combination to compliment your room and what is in it.

Glass closet doors can be the focal point of any room. The glass opacity is up to you. Fully opaque to hide any unsightly stuff or just a little see-through, it’s up to you. The Sliding Door Company solutions save space and we have options to stack all of the panels to the right, the left or in the middle for easy access to everything inside. Our Sliding Closet Doors are a great option for you that improve the mechanics of your upgrade. Our patent ensures that the panels never leave their tracks.

5. Purge

Get rid of what you no longer want or need. Don’t let it back into the room or closet. If you already ruled out an item, keep it ruled out. Less stuff equals more life. This can be quite difficult but keep your mind’s eye on the end game. There are many non-profit organizations that will come and get what you don’t want, and there are organizations that help you sell what you no longer need if you believe it still has some redeemable value.

6. Return to the Room Only What Looks Good in It

Did you high-gloss the closet with a complimentary color? What would look good in there now? Arrange what you are keeping to look good, like a store display. You could get new lighting. Especially with the different levels of opaqueness and the ability to light from within the closet, you can imagine this space with a table in it for books or electronics if you don’t want to build out or install shelving. You don’t have all those unused items anymore so be creative with space. Arrange beautifully, store strategically. Get the furniture back in the room with an eye for what arrangement would be better, eliminating what doesn’t work with your new aesthetic. Take your after picture to remind yourself to not junk it up again. You’re done!

Hitting the reset button on a room can dramatically change how you use it and how you feel when you are in it. A little work will allow you to get the most out of your living space and optimize the time you spend there. Good job!