An open concept within a close concept

Our walk in wardrobe is complete, with the addition of the final piece, the glass door. We had decided on having the doors because an open concept wardrobe would attract too much dusts, conflicting with our desire to have a low maintenance house. However, we still want to open the wardrobe fully in order for both of us to access all the clothes at the same time and so we came up with this idea. We requested for the track to be extended all the way to the 'entrance' so that we would be able to push both doors 'out' of the wardrobe, giving us full access to our clothes. One thing we hated about sliding door last time had always been the fact that only half the wardrobe could be opened at one time. Another alternative was the new-trend bi-fold doors, but that was out of our budget.

Now that the our wardrobe is complete, here are some things to note for future projects.

1. Size of the glass - the ideal maximum size of the glass door is dependent on how big your lift door can fit in. One can always get a larger glass door and request for it to be brought up through the stairs or via a pulley system, but the cost would increase tremendously. The service fees are usually charged per floor, ranging from about $50 to $100 each. Staying on the 20th floor would require $1-2k extras!

2. Support of the glass - Beyond a certain size, the door frame requires a support beam in the middle for the glass to be stably held on by the door frame. I believe the size would depend on the type of materials for the frame, the type of tracks, and the type of usage it is expected to go through, so it would differ between each one. This is nothing too disturbing, but just a friendly reminder to anticipate it because usually the 3D concept drawing will not include it so that it look seamlessly beautiful, yet deceiving.

3. Hanging compartment, shelves and drawers. This are the 3 types of compartments, and the only 3. One could always start by taking a look at the current wardrobe and see what's lacking, and do a rough plan to let your ID know. Afterall, only we ourselves would know what we need most. After our wardrobe is completed, we may have a bit too much drawers and too little hanging compartment ops!

4. Take note of your height and how high you can reach. Even if your ID tells you the height would be the default one, it would be wiser to get the measurement so that it would not be ambiguous. Ours was at 210cm in the beginning, a far reach for both of us. We had to request for it to be lowered to 180cm, which was similar to all our current house wardrobe which we thought was the standard template.

Originally the hubby's drawers were on the right side, but we soon found out it would be blocked by the door when we pushed it to the entrance, a mistake we overlooked. This is because the entrance is slightly smaller than the door itself. Luckily our ID agreed to help us rectify this issue by changing some of the parts of the wardrobe to bring it to the left side.

There were a couple more issues with the walk in wardrobe, and in summary, I feel all of them could have been avoided if we had the blueprint of the wardrobe to look through before the assembly of the carpentries. I could not stress more on the importance of the blueprint, and I hope that in the future, we could avoid the painful mistakes we gone through this time. Please remember to demand for the blueprint if it was not provided.