Daily Home Renovation Tips

For this home renovation tip, a question for you. What do accordion style doors and kitchen drawer handles have in common? You can use the latter on the former.

The picture below is that of the closet door. It is an “after” picture. Focus on the door. We call it an accordion style door (vs a swing door vs a pocket door vs a sliding door).

Previously there was a pair of sliding doors which had to be replaced In a small door opening such as this (30 inches wide) the challenge of a sliding door is that one side or the other remains closed, so you only have at most, in our case, 15 inches of opening at a time (i.e. one side or the other).

A pocket door was out because on the right was the clothes dryer and ton the left is a bedroom…that is to say, no where for the pocket door to go.

This accordion door has two handles……at least now it does. When both from our neighborhood ‘big box’ store, it had one handle, knob style, on the far right. This worked fine to close the door but try opening it…..it did not work well….and it was not the installation, that was fine. It’s simply about leverage.

So, we had two kitchen drawer handles left over. So we removed the knob handle and installed one kitchen handle on top of the hold left by the prior handle. Then we measured vertical and horizontally so in the same position as the first installed handle we installed the second kitchen drawer handle on the right side of the left door panel (i.e. the handle on the left in the picture above).

The result is that the swing door now looks like two separate doors, each with their very own stylish door handle. To open the swing door, we use the handle on the left. To close the swing door we use the handle on the right. And, with a handle vs a knob, this door can now be easily opened and closed by someone in a walker or wheelchair.