To slide or to swing: doors, doors, doors!

(The doodle shows the original layout at the top, our new layout, and the measurements for a sliding door.)

I now know why doors are often in the corners of rooms. When they’re in the middle of a wall, as we’ve cleverly created in our house, an open door becomes an awkward barrier in the room. Our kitchen is narrow, so an open door would block passage completely.

Roscoe is fond of open-plan, so we toyed with doing away with doors altogether. But I do want to be able to put spare guests on a bed settee in the lounge, for which a closeable door would be welcome.

Sliding doors seem an ideal solution (though I maintain that they aren’t as intuitive nor attractive as normal swing doors). But even sliding doors aren’t without their problems. Our friendly builders’ merchants explained:

- The original “Scrigno” brand costs about EUR 300 for a single mechanism

- Scrigno mechanisms have a rail across the bottom, and can take heavy doors (i.e. solid wood)

- The copycat brand looks nicer, without a rail, but can only take light doors (i.e. the hollow kind)

- It costs about EUR 130 per mechanism

- The copycat brand doesn’t do double doors (which we’d hoped to put in)

- They all involve making an aperture double the size of the door, in order to put in the cage into which the door slides. (Our doors are going in supporting walls, so making big holes is no small matter.) The cage is then covered to look like solid wall

- Both brands come in a standard 210cm high. (Ironically, our lintels sit at 205cm high)

I was against the idea of either rails across the bottom, or cheap hollow doors, but Concenzo convinced me that carpenter-made doors would “cost me an eye”. We’d hoped to keep the double width aperture, but eventually compromised on a single-width door that would involve less destuction of supporting walls (as the cage could go in the other half of the hole.

It’s a loss for open-plan living, but everyone involved in the works breathed a sigh of relief.

Our budget for the works so far:

Previous total EUR 226

10 labourer days (1 week) EUR 1,300

2 sliding door mechanisms c. EUR 300

Terracotta crossbeams & other materials c. EUR 200

TOTAL EUR 2,026