Maintenance and care tips for pocket doors

As a standard feature of the home, you want doors to be trouble-free and no hassle. This applies to anything you buy for the house, but particularly for something you use so often and which is required to work so consistently. Maintenance of some features in the home is acceptable and expected given their value and importance, but doors are often an after-thought or a feature we don’t pay much attention to. However, doors perhaps work harder than any other item in the home and inevitably, repeated use over many years will bring wear and tear.

Pocket doors will be used repeatedly, all day every day, but despite being a more complex system than a traditional hinged door, are easy to install and easy to look after. Opening and closing the door is a repeated action which can cause usage issues, but generally speaking these are easy to deal with. Here we have put together some tips on after care and maintenance which will contribute to your pocket door operating seamlessly for many years and proving to be the value-for-money interior design feature you hoped for.

After care

Once your pocket door has been purchased and before installation, you should consider what finish you are going to apply. Internal doors are of course less exposed than external doors, but you still need to protect them. An unfinished door will need varnish or staining, or you can choose to paint the door. But you should do this before it is installed on the rollers, as it is much easier to paint the door with all the sections accessible. The door should be sanded if necessary, but you should be able to apply stain, varnish or paint without any problem. You should also periodically re-apply this finish to deal with any chips, cracks or fading that has appeared. While internal doors are well protected, they do deal with drafts and some moisture (in kitchens and bathrooms) and may be exposed to damp, so the doors do need ongoing protection from time to time, so you should visually inspect them periodically.

Mis-alignment

Moving on from the above maintenance tip, if lubrication doesn’t seem to have solved the door sticking or making a noise, it is possible that the door is not aligned properly and is therefore not running straight on the track. This could be because the track has worked loose and therefore the door is now catching on the floor, or on the sides of the door frame. Repeated use in this situation can lead to the door or the frame becoming damaged, so it is important you do something to solve this issue. The easiest solution is to open the door and re-tighten the screws in the overhead track. You should be able to see if any are loose. If you use a spirit level after this you can check if the track is straight. Of course you can only do this on the track section above the doorway, you also have the hidden track section in the pocket. If you want to re-tighten that part of the track then you will need to remove a section of plasterboard. This can get messy, but is possible to do. If the track is still not straight, or the door is still sticking, you may need to remove the door, remove and re-align the entire track, and re-install the door.

Carpet

If you have fitted a new carpet or the door has dropped a little and is now catching on the floor, you can tighten the screws in the track as above, or you could consider applying a plane to the bottom of the door. This requires removing the door from the track and using a plane to shave a small section of wood off the bottom edge of the door. When people fit a new carpet they often don’t think about the effect this has on the door, ie. there is now much less clearance for the door to operate comfortably. This is less of an issue with a pocket door, as it opens along a horizontal plane, rather than in an arc into the room, but it can potentially cause a problem with pocket doors all the same.

Handles

It is possible for handles to work loose after repeated use, this can lead to the door becoming misaligned and could lead to the door becoming damaged. It should be relatively easy to retighten the screws on the door handle to solve this issue.

Noise

You may find that sound insulation is not as good with a pocket door compared to a traditional hinged door, because there is less of a seal, but you can apply an acoustic seal around the edges of the door to provide better insulation. This helps with temperature control as well as noise control.

Cleaning

The only other maintenance tip is to periodically wipe down pocket doors with warm, soapy water. This improves the appearance and keeps the door looking attractive, but also maintains the structure of the door, particularly where it may be subjected to mould or damp.