DIY Modern Sliding Barn Door

This little closet and I have been through a lot together. We have lived in our home for almost 10 years now. Since moving in, we have upgraded to a King size bed and traded closets several times. My husband first started off with the smaller closet. Then, in an act of true love, I traded with him so he could have the larger of the two.

My first attempt at organizing my small closet can be found here: organizing the world’s smallest closet.
At that point, I added some better shelving inside, took off the bi-fold doors and converted them to more of a French door style complete with mirrors and push lights. Fancy, right?

 

Because of the small size of our room and the small size of the master bathroom, we removed the door to the bathroom almost immediately after moving in. There was hardly room to squeeze around it. It has worked fine, but I’ve always thought it would be nice to have a more compact option.

The idea I had in my head was to come up with a sliding barn door style closet door that could also slide down in front of the bathroom = dual purpose. I wanted to spend as little as possible and I wanted a BIG mirror.

After spending countless hours (or minutes) searching Pinterest, I found 3 general options for barn doors.

1. The expensive option that involved fancy barn door style hardware that creates a smooth, flawless sliding door.
2. The slightly less expensive version that involves cutting metal or wood or rigging up some kind of makeshift system out of pulleys from a garage door opener or a clothing line.
3. The third option and most industrial of the 3, involved:
   1. One metal pipe
   2. Two elbows
   3. Four eye hooks
   4. Four small casters.

 

The mirror was the most expensive part, but we found this one at a pretty good price from the Home Depot at around $50. The cost for the hardware was less than $20. I used my existing bi-fold doors and bracketed them together. The mirror created extra stability.

The only thing I will say about this system is that it is not super smooth and it is slightly noisy. My plan is to grease up the bar a bit to see if it slides better… I’ll keep you posted! All in all, it was cheap, it looks good, and it works!