How Do I Measure For A Pocket Door?

When you are purchasing a pocket door system, it is essential that you get your sizes right. This is helped by some suppliers providing sizing guides, which means you can’t really go wrong, and it is also helped by the fact that in the UK we have standard sizes for important elements such as wall thicknesses and door thicknesses.

Standard wall thicknesses in the UK can be 95mm, 100mm, 115mm or 125mm. And within this, assuming this is a stud wall, the wooden stud itself will be 63mm, 70mm, 75mm, 89mm, 92mm or 100mm.

We offer 10 standard kits to suit the most common UK door sizes, this includes kits for both metric (2040mm) and imperial-sized doors (1981). Kits are available for both single or double doors applications. Therefore if you have 762 x 1981 door, you would need to purchase a 762 x 1981mm kit.

So these parameters help us establish which size of pocket door system to order. When ordering a pocket door system we may already have a door we wish to use, or we may need to order the door separately, so the most important element we need to establish is what size of door we can fit, and hence, what size of pocket door system we need.  

In some cases, the size of the door maybe not be a critical factor and you may be more concerned about the overall frame dimension, i.e. the amount of space you have to accommodate the frame in the wall. If you are limited on the space, this maybe dictate a smaller-sized kit.

Important factors to consider when measuring for a pocket door

• What wall space do you have? As a rough guide when choosing a pocket door system, it is useful to understand what kind of space you will need for installing the complete pocket door frame. Fundamentally, the door frame will be twice the width of the door itself, with a small adjustment factor also added on. This is to ensure the door can be fully opened to sit in the ‘pocket’ in its entirety. And bear in mind also that if you are installing double doors, you will need this space on either side of the two doors. So when measuring the horizontal length needed for a cavity, we typically add a small measurement (36mm) on to enable space for the door to be fitted and to operate freely, so this means the frame size is double the width of the door, plus 36mm. Similarly, we would add 75mm to the height of the door to allow for the runners above the door.
• Don’t forget flooring when measuring height: Another important consideration is to allow for things like floor coverings and floor trims when measuring the height needed for your cavity space. Your kit ideally needs to fit onto the finished floor. You need to ensure that these are allowed for so that your door will be able to operate smoothly and open and close properly. In other words, don’t forget that the door doesn’t sit flush on the floor, it is slightly raised from the floor.
• Stud wall determines thickness: When looking at the thickness of the pocket door opening, this is where the type of stud wall comes into play. The finished wall thickness includes the studwork size and the plasterboard.

Using a sizing guide to order a pocket door system

If we are fortunate to be using a supplier who has a simple sizing guide, then we just need to:

• Measure the size of the opening, ie. the overall height and width of the available space we have to work with
• Choose the frame size that will fit that space, and this will determine which door size we need
• For example, if you have an overall space measuring 2000mm wide, then the largest pocket door system you could accommodate would be 1888mm x 2115mm, and within this system, the pocket door you can fit is a 926mm x 2040mm.