Advantages & Disadvantages of Bifold Closet Doors

Extra Door Space

• Bifold closet doors are more compact and require less space to open than certain other doors, such as swinging doors. This way, you can place furniture directly outside the closet, without the bifold doors hitting it when you open them. Also, when bifold doors fold open, they offer a wider space for you to enter the closet over doors such as sliding doors, but bifold doors offer less open door space than accordian-fold doors.

No Bottom Track

• Bifold doors operate with an overhead track. A roller in the guide door panel slides along this track, and normally requires very little maintenance. It uses no bottom track. Instead, it has a bottom bracket with a hinge pin that keeps the door secure. The lack of a bottom track bypasses the normal problems that sliding doors have with small items falling into the bottom track, blocking the door from sliding smoothly.

Possible Dangers to Children

• One advantage that doors such as swinging closet doors have over bifold doors is that you can install a lock on swinging doors to keep others, especially children, from entering the closet. With bifold door locks, which are usually installed on the top part of the door, children can still manage to pull the bottoms of the doors open and get inside. Also, children often get their hands and fingers pinched between the panels of bifold doors while trying to open them.

Possible Misalignment

• One disadvantage that might occur with bifold doors is that the separate panels can become misaligned. Although the repairs are not complicated, constantly dealing with alignment and other issues is annoying. In addition to getting out of alignment, bifold doors might also jump off the top track when they are opened or shut, or the hinge pins in the top and bottoms of the doors might come out of their brackets. Additional problems occur when the bifold door panels close too tightly, or are too far apart when closed.