Bifold or Sliding Doors: Which to Buy?
5 consideration points when selecting bifold or sliding doors
Spring seems long overdue and how nice it would be to invite it into your house with sliding doors or bifolds, capturing the added light and warmth generated by the sun.
Feature doors of this kind also provide householders with a stylish gateway to gardens on a balmy day thanks to the very wide opening offered when you fully extend them open.
Can’t decide between the two solutions? That’s okay as it’s not the easiest of choices. To offer a visual aid, we have highlighted the top five features of each in the following video.
Take a moment of your time to watch it so you can uncover what door is right for you.
It’s a tough choice settling on either bifold or sliding doors as they have much in common, such as being constructed from advanced materials with high energy efficiency properties, displaying a modern look, housing thermally efficient glazing, and affording slim sightlines.
1. Outside view when shut
Bifolding doors: 4/5 Sliding doors: 5/5
A sliding door narrowly has the edge over bi-folding doors here due to it having more expansive glass panels and less frame obscuring your view when in a closed position.
Generally, a homeowner will settle on a two-pane sliding door, however there is the capacity to advance to four clear glass panes if there’s the space for a generously broad design.
It needs to be stressed though that closed bifold doors don’t severely impair external views because that simply isn’t the case, especially if you have the maximum of 7 panes, and the narrowness of the aluminium profile is non-obtrusive.
2. Outside view when open
Bifolding doors: 5/5 Sliding doors: 4/5
Victory goes to bifolds in this particular category as its unique opening mechanism enables you to fold the design out of the way to remove a significant portion of wall, leaving nothing behind but a colossal aperture.
The sliding door rewards you with an impressive view despite not containing any folding sashes and its panels gliding behind each other, but there’s no denying that vistas are slightly greater through an unlocked bifold.
3. Accessibility
Bifolding doors: 5/5 Sliding doors: 4/5
Any young children in your family will be desperate to make a mad dash for the garden if the sun’s out and a bifolding door’s multi-panelled formation can stack neatly outside, inviting them to do it safely.
Accessibility isn’t quite as liberating with a sliding door as it possesses a fixed frame and isn’t frameless like an opened bifold is, but you can transition from inside to outside without any arduousness.
4. Configuration
Bifolding doors: 4/5 Sliding doors: 3/5
Your home is likely different to next door’s and the opposite may be true of theirs, which serves to highlight how crucial it is that bifold or sliding doors are customised according to where they’re fitted.
Bifolds have phenomenally rich personalisation opportunities, including being produced in anything from two to seven panels, and at customer request, incorporating a passenger door (sometimes promoted as a traffic door) if you want a door you can open and close separately from the accompanying sections.
You can do much to configure a sliding door, beginning with the specifying of a two, three, or four-section design, and you’re in control of colour, hardware, and glazing selections, as you are with a bifold.
5. Space saving
Bifolding doors: 4/5 Sliding doors: 5/5
House size needs to be factored in when determining which of these two space saving doors to buy.
For a smaller-sized property with minimal space to accommodate a new door opening, our sliding doors will eliminate no floor area internally or externally as you slide them from left to right or right to left.
A certain amount of space must be relinquished on one side of a bifold’s threshold because the folding panels assemble together.
A ranking of bifold vs sliding doors
If you experience difficulty knowing whether to invest in bifold or sliding doors, refer to the below table, where we rank each solution out of five in several key spheres.
Bi-Folding Doors
Sliding Doors
Outside view when closed
Bi-Folding Doors
Sliding Doors
Outside view when open
Bi-Folding Doors
Sliding Doors
Accessibility
Bi-Folding Doors
Sliding Doors
Configuration
Bi-Folding Doors
Sliding Doors
Space saving
Bi-Folding Doors
Sliding Doors
Which is better: bifold doors or sliding doors?
We’d like to give you an overwhelming winner or loser, but that’s impossible really as it’s up to interpretation and what you regard as the most important qualities.
Uncover if a sliding door or bifolding door is most to your taste in our Invergordon showroom and fire questions at our team on your visit like “are bifolding doors more expensive than sliding doors?”
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