I've never been a fan of the bi-fold doors on our bedroom closet. My biggest complaint is that when the doors are open, as you see in the second photo, portions of the closet are almost inaccessible. And with two vain men sharing one small closet, we need all the space we can get! Rather than install new doors I decided to convert these bi-fold doors into swing-out doors.
The only supplies I needed to convert the doors were a 1" x 3" x 4' board, 2 packages of 3" mending braces, and 2 packages of magnetic catches. These few supplies came to a total of $9.30.
To convert the door, I removed the top roller from the door and opened it out. Then, with the door open, I screwed three mending braces on each door - one brace at the top of the door, one in the middle, and one near the bottom (photos 3 and 4). These mending braces have effectively turned the two panels that would normally fold together into one solid door.
Now that I have a solid door, the next step is to create a new closure for it. This is where the magnetic catches and the 1" x 3" board come in. I screwed the magnetic catch to the top, inside corner of the door (photo 5). Then I installed the 1" x 3" board to the top of the door frame (photo 7). After lining up the exact placement, I installed the "L" strike plate for the magnetic catch to the bottom of the board (photo 6). Now, when the door closes, the magnet meets the strike plate!
Next week I'll show you how this door conversion has increased the storage options in our little closet.
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Excellently done. My bf and I were just discussing today how much we hate those bi-fold doors. I've had them in two of my former homes and they're not missed!
I have bi-fold doors and find them quite easy to use in a smaller space without having to commit a large empty footprint around the closet to allow for access.
I've only had bifolds where not much else would work, so the issue of changing them never came up. (Although now I have sliders in the guest room and they can be a big pain, too.) This is a very smart fix! Good for you!
oh wow! what an easy fix! i wouldn't have thought of this (i've been wishing for pocket doors).
my bifold doors overlap my washer & dryer and i'm constantly pushing them out of the way (which doesn't work and last time i forced one off track in frustration).
i'm going to have to try this out. it also seems easy enough to undo if you need to. thanks for sharing :)
Our laundry area is in desperate need of this fix. Since we added ceramic tile to this area the doors have never properly worked again. I guess I'm wondering though if we could add hinges to the door and door frame?
Smart - And a nicely organized closet!
I just did this with my closet, only I turned one bi-fold door into "double doors" that open out as these do. So much better!
How ironic....
I had to switch to a bi-folding door for my bathroom so I could use the space behind as storage and give it somewhat more sense of space. The original door was way too big, (even though it was narrow).
Since standard closet doors are shorter than regular I had to add about 3 inches more at the bottom to make them taller... textured them with a fork to give them continuation with the same "wood grain" pattern and then I stained the whole thing dark brown as all my other apt. doors are....
It works perfect....
This is the best idea I've seen in a while. My five year old son likes to play in the closet and goes in and out all day. The bi-fold doors are forever getting stuck and don't work very well after all that abuse. We've replaced some of the roller mechanisms before but I thought there must be a better solution and I think this might be it! Thanks for posting.
@brenton others:
Any good instructions on turning a single bi-fold door into two slim doors opening out?
Johnson makes hardware that allows bi-fold doors to open out of the way. If I had walls on both side of my closet where I could fold back the doors, I'd be interested. Since I don't, here the link http://johnsonhardware.com/fdindex.htm
Maximum is 98" high X 24" wide per panel, I think.
A cleaner way to do that is attaching the braces on the top and underside of the door.
Thank you SO much for this tutorial and for the inspiration!!
I wanted french outswing doors for my all of my closets. I shelled out close to $400 for custom shaker panel french doors for my entrance closet and knew we couldn't afford to put in 2 more in our master bedroom. So this is the PERFECT solution!
The only thing is that I don't love the profile of the 6-panel door. Maybe I could try plain doors ... hmmm ...
I'm seriously obsessed with this! What an easy solution to something I initially believed to be quite complicated. I also really appreciate how easily undone this could be (for anyone who's a renter)!
My husband and I hated our bifold doors. In fact, we took them down in our hall closet and pantry, and put up curtains instead. It was easy for us since we were redoing our floors and thereefore we could redo the trim around the closets at the same time. We still need to tailor the curtains, but they look 100% better than those bifolds... Pictures of the curtained closets are at the below link.
http://www.breakandmake.com/2010/07/06/curtains-vs-doors/
hahaha laurbe! you're trying to pimp your own site & i get a 'You 404’d it. Gnarly, dude.' error. hope the curtain doors worked out better than that linking thing.
Another suggestion to save space is to get thinner doors. I recently set out to replace the ugly hollow-core bi-fold doors in my bedroom closets. I wanted to replace them with a shaker-style door to match the rest of the doors in the house but because our house is an antique colonial no off-the-shelf doors would work. I was looking for an inexpensive replacement option that would take up less space the the standard 2" doors. I ended up getting exactly the size I needed in 1" thick doors by ordering kitchen cabinet doors. I found a site that could do it quickly and it was much more affordable than custom doors (I think it came out to $80/door). The best part is that when open they only take up 2" on either side (the same amount of space as 1 normal door).
The site I ordered from was: http://www.quikdrawers.com/
I try and I fixed the link ;)
http://www.breakandmake.com/2010/07/06/curtains-vs-doors/
This is a fabulous idea. I've been dying to use the underutilized space on the back of my bi-fold doors... now I'll have tons of space for my shoes, and handbags and hats, and, and... Yippee!!!
This is great! I am renting and have bifolds on the bedroom closet and we hate them. Is this something I can do and then put back together when the lease is up?
Angelica23, I think this is totally doable for a rental, as I seriously doubt the few small screw holes from the hardware will be noticed on a move-out walk-through. I'm renting and totally going to do this! I'm so excited to lessen the amount of totally useless space in my currently bifolded closet.
I'd like to do this with the bi-fold doors in my apartment but the doors are made of metal. Any ideas?
My husband and I were inspired by this idea as a great way to utilize space....we are in the process of converting all of our bi-fold doors this way. We've done the hallway closet and masterbedroom and LOVE it. I also replaced the knobs with more attractive hardware from anthropologie. Love it!
Hooray for bookmarks: I just (finally!) did this and it is an amazing improvement!