Clutter Video Tip: What to Do With Sliding Closet Doors

Lately sliders are known as a tasty miniature treat. For me, sliders are the bane of my home organizing existence. Sliding doors on a closet are not an efficient use of space. Watch this video to see the tricks I have up my sleeve.

(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdslider.)

Transcript:

Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today I’m going to answer a question from a viewer that we got about those pesky sliding closet doors. Nobody likes these. The person who wrote in was asking if there’s a way to deal with these doors without removing them. Unfortunately, there are not great solutions for this. There is no magic product that I can think of – I’ve never seen one – where two panels that pass in front of each other are able to store things on those panels. It just can’t be. So if you do want to leave your doors up, there’s one thing you can try that’s not a great solution, but you can mount an over-door product. So you can see these products all on-line somewhere on Google. You can find, you know, canvas shoe bags, pocket bags, you can find racks, various over-door products of many kinds. And then they usually will install with a hook that goes right over the top of the door and it’s very simple. The difference here is because of the sliding mechanism and because of the proximity of the two doors, the over-door hooks may not work. So, if you can mount those products directly to the front of the front-most door so that it’s the door that always stayed in the front, you can have some extra storage there. It’s going to be out in the middle of the room where you can see it, and it’s not a very elegant solution.

So that’s one thing you can do. It is not my favorite thing, I wouldn’t do it. My preference is to remove the doors. So if you do that, there are several options with that. You can leave the space open. So think about it. It’s a little bit more of a contemporary look. It gives you a lot more access to the stuff in the closet, it makes the room feel bigger, and you’ll have to organize it and make it look really cool, and then you will be motivated to keep it that way because you can’t close the doors on it.

So that can be helpful, and it gets rid of the sliding problem. Also, you can frame that out with some curtains or some kind of a fabric screen or folding screen. So you can have a little bit more of a decorative finish to it, and you can cover it up when you need to. But my favorite solution is just to replace the doors. So to get double doors that open out so that you can have storage on the back of those doors, you’ll see here we did French doors on this closet. We frosted the glass so that it would have a nice aesthetic look. And then the homeowner was able to store her big collection of scarves and shawls on the back. And that was a really nice feature for her.

So those are some ways that you can handle those sliding doors. There may be others; that’s what I’ve seen in my years of work as a professional organizer, but if you have other solutions, we’d love to hear them in the “comments” and if you need help with projects like this, we solve these problems every single day, seven days a week in our Member Message Board area. You can get personal consulting from our expert team for about the price of a pizza. So check us out at https://www.clutterdiet.com/learnmore. See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.

You may have been searching for how to deal with sliding closet doors or organizing small closets.

Click here for FREE decluttering help NOW!