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Laundry Closet Door Problems

C P
3 years ago

My house was built in the 1940s, and the previous owner converted a regular closet into a laundry closet (around 32" deep and 52-53" wide). There was a big problem with the door installation however: they installed bi-fold doors but without a track, just with hinges, and the doors just sort of lay closed (I assume they did this because the space isn't deep enough with the existing doors to allow them to open/close properly). Because of space constraints on the right side (next to what is the guest bathroom door) they installed the hinges on the right side sideways, underneath the bathroom door frame. This means that even removing the existing hinges would require removing the bathroom door frame and installing a new one, which I am not thrilled about. But now I really have to do something about it because the doors literally fell off the hinges, leaving the space as you see it here:



I have wracked my brain trying to figure out options, and the best option I can think of is to try to find the thinnest bi-fold doors we can and install a track, in the hopes that if we can get thinner doors there will be enough clearance to have the doors lay just inside the opening (the previous doors were standard 1 3/8" thick, so I was hoping to find 7/8" or 1" thick doors). My husband thinks a better option is for him to install a header of some kind above the opening and install the track on that. I am worried the header will look weird and also that since the doors will not sit inside the opening, that will also look weird. If we go with either of those options, we have an additional problem: our door opening is non-standard, so we need two 26" doors that are 1", if possible (we've seen a lot of 24" and 28" options). So that suggests custom, which I am guessing would be pretty pricey.


So, are there other options that I’m not thinking of? How much clearance do we realistically need to open bi-fold doors so I’m not scraping the dryer as I’m opening it? Does anyone know where we could find the kind of doors we're thinking about?


Other options we have considered and rejected include:

(1) Barn doors (no space on either side for that)

(2) Pocket doors that fold in on the sides (I loved this idea, but we don’t have enough space within the laundry closet itself for those to fold into the side--as you can see, there is no extra room there now, and it is only 54” wide)

(3) Replacing the hinges with the fully-open bi-fold door hinges (I’m not sure this would actually fix the space problem, and I don’t think we have the space to install this on the right side)

(4) Replacing the washer/dryer with ones that aren’t as deep (our current washer/dryer aren’t actually that deep currently, so we’d need to switch to the 24” deep apartment-style ones, plus it's a lot of money, so not a fan of this option)

(5) Installing a dryer box to move the dryer back (not really an option since our dryer vents into the crawlspace directly under our house—instead of venting into the wall, then, it vents downward)

(6) Hanging a curtain, window-shades, or blinds in front of it (not a fan of the aesthetic appearance or the lack of sound-proofing)

(7) Leave it open without doors and just replace the current laundry rack above the washer/dryer with closed cabinets (not ideal because our house is very open concept and you can see it from the living room)


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