How to Install Super SMOOTH Pocket Doors!

Oh honey, you know how much I love my good hardware. Today's construction shows everything about sliding

doors

. You know, if you've been in the business like I have for 25 years, you've seen all kinds of problems with sliding

doors

over the years. had this in your house before the ghost opened the clue, that's all Dicky when it opens, he falls off the clue, he scrapes the door when he comes in, all kinds of things can come up, but it really comes down to just two things , we need a good

install

and we need a good hardware, today's construction program I am going to go into all the details so that you can build a door as beautiful as this.

Today's build show sponsored by cavity sliders, let's get off to a good start guys, sliding doors and making them. the right starts at this stage or in the framing state, it's actually in my personal home, we're in my daughter's bedroom here and this sliding door that opens here will separate her bathroom from the bedroom and then I have a second one framed here, which is going to separate the shower area from this vanity space. Now this opening in my daughter's bedroom is going to be a two six six eight opening and it starts with an approximate opening size.

Now we have a header here to take some load from above. and first let's talk about the height, we want to take the height of the door plus four and a quarter inches, so in that case we would have about seven and a quarter, my framer added another quarter there for safety, it's always better to go a little bigger . you can frame the opening instead of being too small, that's when the problems arise, now with the width remember this is a 2/6 door so it's 30 inches we'll double that and add two inches and again added about a half inch for safety now when it comes to this stage of construction we want to

install

this frame usually this sliding door frame which is in the frame construction stage once my windows are in place and the house It's dry, we don't want to get this wet later, but I like to do this before I start my trade, so we're getting ready for the electricians, plumbers, and HVAC guys to install it.

Normally I want to do this now that way if I have a mechanical boot or something on the ceiling I can line it up with the center of the door, then let's talk hardware since you call your carpentry supplier and tell them I need them to bring me a set of sliding doors to my workplace, you'll probably get something like this. a fairly lightweight pre-assembled wooden frame, you can see it's a little flimsy, it will have a door stop installed here, it will include some type of rail that may or may not be attached to a hull, you can see, this is just some stamp steel, nothing very exciting there and then you will also have a hardware package, now this hardware package, these are all the instructions you have for this installation, two pages of some cartoons is all you get, but look at the hardware now.

It is not a very expensive game. I'll grant you this costs maybe a hundred to two hundred dollars, something like that from your carpentry supplier, but look how cheap they were talking when it comes to hardware, this is the actual car that will fit here. and roll on the stamped steel track, we have four nylon rollers, no ball bearings and a fairly cheap little setup, something goes wrong with this after a couple of years, now you have problems, on the other hand, what are we going to install here at My House is this cavity slider, it's now more expensive, not a totally fair comparison because on the other hand this set is probably three times the cost of this one from the woodworking supplier, but if you think about all the returns of calls, all the problems you will have.

We have experimented as builders over the years on sliding doors, we don't want to spend money on either the installation or the material, and this is the way to go now, this is the cavity slider, this frame that we have assembled in the site, it really comes. In a box like this, you can ask your woodworking supplier to pre-assemble this frame and deliver it to you. I like the other one if you want it, but it's a pretty simple assembly now, these will come in the standard sizes for doors Oh up to about four or door and width and then six eight and one finger heights, but one of the things I really like This is that you can modify them on site if necessary, for example, I broke this as a two eight six eight door, but at the last minute I decided I know what I think: I actually want to put a two and six door here to give my daughter a little more space in the bathroom, so it was a pretty simple process, all we had to do is take these connectors here and cut them to resize the door and then you'll notice we also reduced a little bit the track size so this works for a slightly smaller door.

I loved that it was so easy for me to do now when it comes to putting this together. You may be a little worried because you've never worked with aluminum before. It's really simple. You can cut with your circular saw. You can use the same saws that you would use for standard woodworking and for this aluminum. They include all the self-tapping tools. Threading sheet metal screws is a really simple process. If you haven't done this before, you probably want to do it a lot. You know, about sixty-seven to five minutes the first time you do this to actually read the instructions and by the way, the instructions are fantastic compared to those silly little instructions, you have a very detailed instruction sheet from the slider on the cavity that really shows you all the steps from start to finish, a very nice assembly guide and one last thing I wanted to mention: these connector rails, you can see they are offset.

In fact, move them a little bit so that if I had a cabinet butting up against this wall, I could slide this rail down so I could connect that cabinet to my wall stud, so to speak, right here and the last thing I want. I mentioned these Jam legs right here where the door actually slides in just a slight outward curve that way it will resist the force of the drywall. It is also in the center where the hardware will give just a slight amount of extra width to secure. You don't have any drag or any problem.

Another nice thing about this is that you have these angles here that are perfect nineties, so when you screw that corner and the four corners together you know you have a nice square. The corner donor now did a great job of getting out the tape measure and checking his Really simple to blow that thing up. inside and make sure we're nice and square and now that it's assembled you can see it's a really very sturdy bomber frame compared to this cheap car, look at the cavity slide version right here, it's actually not even a fair comparison this is totally different this is a chunky piece of hardware compared to this flimsy little one we have four ball bearings here this is serious business it's actually been tested in a million performances and the bottom leg here that's actually Let's go to keep the door of our house a little play, so that if our door is not perfectly plumb, it can absorb that slack.

Also, check this out, we don't have to take it off the end of the rail, we can put it in. and take it out if we ever need to repair the door which is awesome hardware, you get what you pay for in sliding doors and remember once this hardware is installed in this rough opening at the framing stage it will never be easy or as cheap . to modernize now it was time to spend the money on this, okay let me talk to you about how to install this frame, okay guys now that your frame is built how do you go from here where all the frames are assembled on the floor and here? where everything is fully assembled, the doors on everything work very well, so a couple of critical things you need to know about number one, probably the most important thing is that your headboard is perfectly level all the way around.

You realize that when Gilbert installed this, he fell. the level on that header and made sure the thing was absolutely dead, that's really critical now, one thing I like about this cavity slider system compared to a lot of tracks, as you'll notice above the header, there's no here nothing screwed to the header. These legs support the weight and reduce it, and because it's aluminum, everything is bolted together. This frame is actually very strong and rigid. Now I don't have to screw it into the head, which means if my head moves or changes over time. I'm not going to have a header coming my way in the future, right, my carpenter can walk out of here and it's perfectly level, but if that header shrinks, moves or swells over the years with the movement of the house, it might have a problem in the future in this case.

We're screwing in the jams and then this takes the weight, so it's pretty slippery. The next thing you'll notice is that Gilbert, when he set up the tent, hit a line flush with the wall line here, remember this is a 30 inch door. so we have a 62 inch opening, we want to make sure that that track is perfectly flush with this wall that way, when this door opens and closes, it will look correct in the opening. Okay, now we install a dunnage door on this, which means This is a door that is for construction only. You could also put the finished door here, but I usually don't order my doors until the end of the framing stage and then they arrive at the job site, you know, three four weeks later. and my carpenter Gilbert would install the swing doors and these doors at the same time.

One cool thing about the system is that it makes removing the door really easy and having the door in place now ensures that we can do everything right, all the soft close is It works perfectly all that kind of stuff, but when you take it off you will notice these bits of jam right here where they connect to the metal. The type has a cavity slider. He has a great system. They have these little ones like a cookie that will slide out. in a cut here and it's going to pop up, that means it's going to be very easy to remove this trim later and there's no key to take the door off the track system off the roller system, press a button and the doors will open properly. off makes it really very easy, now let's talk about the soft opening function of the soft clothing.

If your door is 32 inches, you can have a 2:8 door, you could actually soft close it, which means come this way against the jamb and you can gently open it if you want and this is what this system looks like right here, this It's the roller on the back and there's a little lock on the track and you'll notice that it will engage right there, that's the piston that closes

smooth

ly and that the doors that it comes in you can do it in both directions, you can also do this, do it in one direction which is an improvement, you can also get the door without it now, in this case this door is smaller than that one.

I couldn't close

smooth

ly in both directions. I only have soft clothes, but I don't have soft openings, so you can see the piston when it activates, closing it that way, but in this direction I couldn't get it, this is just a two and six door, however, I must say that its standard system is really good. I have been using this for over 30 years. This is a sponge that actually adheres to this metal jamb. They have two in there, one at the top and one at the bottom, which means that when I open the door there is none of that traditional rattling that happens when you stop abruptly in a traditional system that I have used in the past, this one has a nice almost closing feature. soft built-in, the other cool thing is that the sponge provides a little bit of resistance, so when the door is in the open position, I can press against it, that door will come towards me, so if I didn't have a latch handle or a finger pull, that would be another way to remove the door from the system.

I mentioned aluminum earlier. I think this is an important feature of these doors, which are made of strong aluminum, apart from typical systems that are cobbled together from plywood. Sometimes the finish carpenter builds them on site which means my slight arch in the jamb here means my doors won't scuff when it goes through my hardware will go through just fine and any paint job I have on there will look good in the years to come, ok let's talk about the bottom rail of the door, there is some sort of fin that will fit into a slot that you are finished with, the carpenter will mill the bottom of the door and that will keep the door from wobbling in the rail and look at this, they have thought of everything, we have 2 different size fins depending on the thickness of the floor so they are 1 inch and 2 inches and in my case here I am transitioning with a marble threshold so I used the taller, I cut it and rounded it just in the hair, so so I love that you can fit anything into these andIf you were to make that slot larger than 1/4 inch by accident, you can't actually do this, so we can take it out, move it in that slot to make sure the door doesn't wobble as it goes into the

pocket

, which It's really good, it's okay to install it.

I think I covered everything. The last thing I want to mention is when your reed rockers come with a traditional

pocket

change or they might have wood jams. You'll need to use some self-tapping sheet metal screws to screw in the sheetrock here and then when you're done the carpenter will come and put up any trim or casing you have on the outside. One tip I could say is when we're going to install this top molding, don't nail here and don't do it that way, it will be very, very easy, there's nothing to have to pull later, it would be very easy to remove this top piece and then pull that one door in the future if you ever needed it, say repaint the door in 10 or 15 years when you are changing the colors of the house.

It's pretty simple. Okay, let's close the video and quickly talk about the differences between this system and the standard system installed here now. Not satisfactory, same installer. Gilbert did both for me. Gilbert is a fantastic installer, but in this case it's all about the hardware. Now, can you imagine what they're going to sound like in five or ten years and then you have this loud I don't know what plastic stop on the bottom that's already denting the door and when it hits, look at this? I mean, it's just shaking the entire wall the guide to look at that plastic guide at the bottom of the door that guides the door into the opening, it will scrape off the paint almost immediately, you'll be missing this kind of strip of paint on the bottom. bottom of Door guys don't use cheap hardware, we want our homes to be satisfactory.

We want our customers to open these sliding doors five years from now, ten years from now and walk away and this is a well-built home. Great job by my builder. It is his vocation. If you ever want to change this hardware, think about how much drywall we would have to remove and remove from there and if that header ever moves on us at the top, where those shims are, this door will come off a level and It will start to close by itself or open by itself no, it's just not worth it, use the good hardware, guys, thanks for joining me in this depth.

Dive into sliding doors and a big thank you to my friends at Cavity Sliders. It's a really nice system. If you are building your home, talk to your builder about this. If you are an architect, specify and if you are a builder like me, click. link below to go to their website so you can find a local dealer where you can purchase these Cavity Slider systems for your workplace. If you are not currently subscribed, please press the subscribe button. We have new content every Tuesday and Friday. Follow me on Twitter Instagram, otherwise see you next time at Bill Joe.