The “Loud and Annoying” Feature That Should Never Be in Your Bedroom, According to Pros

One thing about me: I love a feature that fills a home with character. Wood-paneled ceilings? Yes! Sunken living rooms? Sign me up! Crown molding? Please, please, please! The house my parents moved into after I graduated college is a split-level ranch meets mid-century modern home in Texas that isn’t overwhelmed with this level of character but does have some very fun quirks — including a pocket door that leads to one guest bathroom.

I’ve never lived in a house with a pocket door, and I’ve always found them to be fun. That’s why I was bordering on jealous when Apartment Therapy Executive Editor Terri Pous told me that she moved into an apartment with a pocket door herself. Except unlike me, she was not super happy about it. Even though it’s a small space superhero, hers was in a place that made it a major issue: It’s her bedroom door. 

Yes, Terri tells me, “They’re space-saving. And while I do appreciate that feature, the one in my apartment comes with a lot more drawbacks. For one, it’s so loud and squeaky, no matter how many times we call our super to take a look at it.”

Pros agree that placement is everything, and bedrooms are not a great place for pocket doors. “I’m a big fan of pocket doors, because I’m always looking for ways to save space,” says Dan Staupe, the co-owner of Compass Exteriors. “But … used in a bedroom, it can be loud and annoying,” he says. So here’s everything you need to know about pocket doors.

A pocket door is a door that slides into a pocket of the wall when opened, rather than swinging out like a traditional door. It slides into the wall by being placed on a track and roller system into a pocket frame, which is a hollowed out piece of wall built to house the door when the door is open. At the end of the day, they’re space-efficient — and that matters a lot. 

“A real estate professional such as myself looks at pocket doors as a ‘smart space saver with trade-offs,’” says Thomas O’Shaughnessy, a real estate expert at Clever Offers. “These doors are really useful in small bathrooms, laundry areas, small hallways, or any room in which installing a swinging door would swallow up about 8 to 10 square feet of precious space.” But not so much in bedrooms — and there are plenty of reasons why. 

Pocket doors are great in high-traffic areas where you’ll mostly want to keep the door open, says Staupe, like between the living room and kitchen or dining room and living room. That’s a “door that can stay open long-term and doesn’t create as much of an issue,” he says, enabling you “to turn the room into an open space-type deal when you have guests, but then close the door back up when you’re cooking or you want to improve energy efficiency, separate the spaces, etc. [But a bedroom is a space where] you usually want the door closed. You don’t want it clanging back and forth a million times a day.”

Pocket doors are loud. They literally roll into the wall they live in, and that roller and the sound of the wood moving is much louder than a regular door that you can quietly click closed. 

Additionally, experts say that because pocket doors have to live in a piece of hollowed-out wall, they are often not nearly as soundproof as a classic, really solid wood bedroom door attached to a solid bedroom wall. 

“Pocket doors can work well in bedrooms, but sound insulation depends on how they’re installed. Using a soft-close mechanism and an acoustic pocket system can help reduce noise. Choosing the right setup ensures privacy without compromising on the space-saving benefits of a pocket door,” says Ben Mottershead, the CEO at Pocket Door Superstore.

Not having a properly insulated pocket door is a problem if, say, your bedroom is right off the main living space — a classic configuration in many NYC apartments. As your roommates watch late-night television or get up early while you’re trying to rest, the fact that the door isn’t as soundproof as a classic door is something that gets old, fast. 

And for Terri, it’s led to a problem that has cascaded into a different room: her living room. “The nature of a pocket door is that it leaves a hollow space when it’s pulled out to be closed. For us, this means we can’t hang our TV on [the living room wall on the other side of our bedroom] since there are no studs or any support to hold it up. Yeah, we can hang the TV elsewhere, but this is the ideal spot for it, so we had to rework our layout and vision once we realized this. The other downside is it makes our already-thin walls even more thin, so sound travels through the hollow wall really quickly.”

Indeed, Blaz Korosec, CEO of Investorade, says, “you can’t hang anything heavy on the track wall, and acoustically they’re usually terrible unless it’s a commercial track. It’s not just noise either. They warp, stick, and drag as soon as the humidity changes. If the door’s opening to a frequently used bathroom or bedroom it has to function smoothly … silently … which it almost never does. I’ve seen more homeowners tape them shut than properly align them.”

In the end, Terri couldn’t have known that the pocket door would be an issue when touring her apartment — the NYC rental market moves fast, and she and her husband had to find an apartment that made sense for them on more levels than just not liking a specific bedroom door. And it’s better that it’s a rental than the alternative.

Korosec says that pocket doors can be a real bummer when it comes to resale value: “In small rooms or during older remodels pocket doors can be enclosed by drywall inside warped walls that were never meant for pocket doors. This is a killer for resale, as most buyers see it coming. It’s not like the repairs are simple either, as you cut open drywall to get to the mechanism and it’s almost always placed too deep to adjust on your own.”