Installing a Barn Door Style Sliding Door on a Bathroom

I’ve never installed one of these interior sliding doors or as some people call them “barn doors”. There originally was a pocket door on the left side of the entrance to the bathroom that the homeowners wanted to get rid of. So this seemed like a good solution. I didn’t think there was much to the installation. The rollers bolt to the door. You mount the rail to a header board that gets screwed to the wall. Make sure the rail is level. Then hang your door on the rail. Not very complicated so what could possibly be difficult about this.

There are a few things to deal with that are a little out of the ordinary. To begin with, the door has to be oversized. The reason for this is that the door has two kind of blanket the opening. As a result, the door probably needs to be a minimum of 4 inches larger than the opening for the door. We had a 32 inch opening and so a 36 inch wide door was perfect. However, when you mount the header and rail above the existing trim on the door it requires that several inches of material be added to the length of the standard door in order to make it work. Or you have to have a custom door built which obviously adds more money to the project.

Another question I had that wasn’t addressed very well by the instructions or the template was how high does the rail need to be from the floor which means you have to figure out how high above the door do the wheels need to be mounted. So I sort of eased my way through this process by mounting the header where I knew I needed to mount it and then securing the wheels to the door where I figured they needed to go and used the template as a reference. Then I could put the door in place and make a pretty good guess at where the rail needed to be mounted. I first mounted the header board to the wall. Next mounted the left side of the rail to the header board then swung it up to it’s position on the right side and drilled a hole for that bolt, being careful to make sure that I mounted the rail level. The hole in the rail on the right side was a little more of a slot than a hole, so it can be moved up or down a little bit to fine tune the placement of the rail.

With the rail in place and secured, the door with the rollers attached can be set on the rail and you’re ready for final steps on installation. That involves putting some hardware in place that mounts to the end of each side of the rail and locks in place to keep the door on the rail. There are also a couple of small cushions that are screwed into the top of the door and keep the door from bouncing off the rail if it is slammed into the stop hardware on either end of the rail.

Now, why does our door drift about a foot from left to right when it is in the closed position. The rail is level. The wheels are secured to the door. Some of you may have a better explanation than me about this but my first thought was, “oh great, this thing is going to be a pain to keep adjusted.” The fact that the door only opened about a foot led me to conclude there must be a slight dip in the rail through this area. It’s possible that if the door were heavier, that might help with some of this. But in the end, after talking to the homeowners, this is what we came up with. First, this is the bathroom door that primarily needs to be either open or closed. Since the bathroom is completely remodeled, it’s most likely that the door will be left open except for when is in use. So the fact that the door tends to want to slide to the right or in the open position is not necessarily a bad thing. We just need for to stay closed when it needs to be closed. After some thought we came up with this solution which works great. I took a couple of magnets and embed them in blocks that were then mounted on the backside of the door and up against the trim on the right side of the doorjamb. So when the door gets near to the closed position the magnets take over and draw together and in so doing, keep the door closed. Plus the magnets are really never seen. With the door guides mounted to the floor, the magnets have no chance to do anything except be drawn to each other when the door is closed. We need to come up with a sliding bolt type lock for inside the bathroom since this is a bathroom door. But that’s an easy fix.