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Pivoting as a Parent this School Year

If you have kids that are still in school, you’re probably experiencing the uncertain and undulating roadmap of the future of education. With COVID-19 rearranging our schedules, altering our abilities, and whereabouts, one industry that has perhaps suffered the most is education. Toddlers in preschool, middle schoolers, high school students, and university scholars alike have all experienced a trying year, a crash-course in pivoting. Learning how to adapt to shifting circumstances has not been easy, and as we look ahead to brighter days, we also must address the current educational climate, now in October. The percentage of schools open to in-house teaching is only a small percentage, peppered throughout the country, while most education is being taught online from home.
For states that experience drastic weather changes during the winter months, such as the East Coast and Midwest, it will not be possible to hold classes outside, as was the solution starting this fall school year. With flu season nearing and temperatures dropping, we may start to see a greater push for at-home learning. For those educational institutions choosing to continue classes indoors, new spatial solutions will be an absolute necessity for safeguarding all students and faculty against the virus.

Working from Home

If you’ve recently been asked to bring learning home after your children have already started this school year in a real school setting, the transition can be cumbersome. Home doesn’t exactly emulate the same classroom setting, often making it difficult for students to focus and keep on top of their coursework. Especially for children who are used to having their own special space in a classroom, their own desk, as well as a physical instructor and teacher aids helping guide their learning process, homeschooling can be a huge challenge. With so many external factors contributing to their inability to focus like other siblings, pets, and toys, it’s no wonder this has been a trying time for so many. If you’re like most parents, you’re probably wondering how you can set your child up for success for the rest of the school year. After all, if we’ve learned anything from 2020 it’s that the future is a complete mystery- with no known timeline of this virus to help aid our decisions.

What We Can Do

One of the quickest and swiftest decisions you can make for your child’s learning process from home is to provide them an educational sanctuary within your home. Most of us don’t have an extra bedroom available to make a classroom come to life seamlessly, however, there are other reasonable solutions. You can easily and affordably construct a home office/classroom within an open space by using Sliding Glass Wall Partitions. Glass partitions are easy to install and remove, affording you the flexibility you need during these uncertain times. Next month everything could change, and the kids could be back in school, and that’s why it’s important to come up with malleable solutions that don’t break the bank! Floor-to-ceiling glass wall dividers can be constructed within a matter of hours and your little ones can enjoy the extra privacy and focus they need to succeed this school year. Choose from varying glass opacities to achieve your desired level of privacy- from completely transparent, to opaque, you have tons of options for customization.

Get Them Active!

If your children have recently returned home to do remote learning, one of the best ways to ensure a productive, less-stress day is to get them outside often. If you can, encourage them to take small breaks every few hours so that they can get up and walk around and take in the fresh air while burning some of that pent-up energy! Too much stagnant energy can certainly keep children of any age from focusing. Go on a walk together, ride bikes, or encourage them to make up their own games in the backyard. During a normal school day, they would have lots of time to play with other kids, run around the schoolyard, engage in P.E. or after-school sports. It’s important to make sure that they still get this activity time!

Give you and your kids the gift of calm this fall with awesome space optimizing solutions offered at The Sliding Door Company. Hop online and check out our viewing catalog of Sliding Glass Room Dividers, beautiful Sliding Glass Barn Doors, and more! Schedule a free initial consultation with one of our knowledgeable experts to get started on your exciting project today. Don’t wait until your kid’s grades start dropping to call the space experts today!

TSDC 1029 – A

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Bring Your Vacation Rental Into the ‘20s With These Design dos.

Many folks are making the smart financial decision to upgrade and redesign their homes to become effective vacation rentals. Not only is this a great ROI, but it’s an intelligent way to utilize your home or a wing of your house that is not getting a lot of use. By crafting your home into a profitable rental, you set yourself up for financial freedom and can begin to enjoy the perks of monetizing your own home. Before you begin, there are a few key considerations to think about when setting out to monetize your pad and invite awaiting guests into your slice of heaven. Why wait to discover these solutions the hard way? The exciting road to generating passive income for you and your family is just ahead- with these tips you can start the transformation today!

Consistent Design

It’s exceedingly important in this industry to craft a rental that exudes a consistent design theme. Mostly speaking on the interior spaces, but taking into consideration the exterior decor wouldn’t hurt, either. You’ll want to do a fair amount of research on current style trends, design themes and interior fads that are dominating the market and leading the way. It’s important to stay up to date and adapt to an ever-evolving interior industry. This will speak volumes to the quality and value of your rental, which will set you apart from your rental competition. Below are a few of the top Interior Design trends entering into 2020.

  • Mid Century Modern
  • Natural Luxury
  • Shabby Chic
  • Industrial Modern
  • Hollywood Regency

These styles are consistent and desired by renters and vacationers across the globe. Pick one theme and stick to it. If you try to cross-pollinate too many design styles, you’ll end up with a muddied aesthetic- interior decor that appears confused and over-worked. However, by employing some exciting artistic flourishes and design picks going into the new decade will put your rental on the map and draw in visitors looking to enjoy their stay in luxury and style.

Consider adding oval furniture, two-tone kitchens, patterned wallpaper, Moroccan and middle eastern textiles and accent pieces, unique rugs, and sleek sophisticated furniture. Attention to detail is massively important. The first thing vacation renters look for when seeking to book is aesthetic and taste. They want to treat and impress their fellow guests with a smart rental that everyone can enjoy.

Make Your Rental Fool Proof

This is to say, most people have the ‘appliance competence’ of a small child. You must fool-proof your home if you want your renters to have a positive experience. If they can’t decipher how to use a feature or a handy appliance within thirty seconds, it becomes completely unusable and cast to the side. You also must take into consideration the need to child-proof the rental. The last thing you want is for a child to accidentally cut themselves on a sharp corner or table edge or break a delicate object. Causing them pain and costing you money. Things like easy to use shower nozzles, light switches in obvious and convenient locations, simple coffee makers will make a guest’s stay much more hassle-free. Consider your provided entertainment center and take the time to make sure it’s simple enough to use- the remote controls are labeled for clarity and you might even want to craft a simple cheat sheet for them to save time and confusion. Other integral features of the rental, such as doors and mirrors should be easy to use. For example, modern sliding doors installed throughout the rental will up the value and improve overall aesthetic while providing easy-to-use functions for your visitors. Sliding closet doors, sliding bathroom doors even mirrored sliding closet doors will provide simplicity, save space that typical swinging doors take up and add a unique look to your vacation home.

Eco- Forward Features

Because you are about to have an influx of people renting your home, there is going to be inevitable taxation on your resources. People who are on vacation and enjoying a home that is not their own will likely be less frugal with the resources provided. That means extra water, electricity as well as typical wear and tear costs put on you. A great way to mitigate this increase in usage is to set about updating your home with eco-conscious appliances, products, and features. Things like high-efficiency toilets, recycled paper towels and bath tissue, LED lights, solar-powered path lighting, glass doors and glass walls providing natural light, and installing dimmers on light switches could make a huge difference in your energy costs and eco-footprint. Your renters will be happy to know they’re staying in a low-impact home and you can even use these eco upgrades as a selling point- setting your rental apart from the rest!

With these simple yet effective considerations and upgrades to your home, you’ll be on your way to dominating the rental scene in just about any city. Employing a consistent design theme, fool-proofing your rental and switching to eco-forward features will have a serious impact on the quality of your rental, as well as save you resources and stress. For more space optimizing solutions and inspiration, visit The Sliding Door Company to browse our online viewing catalog and Get A Quote from one of our team members to start your rental upgrade today!

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The Importance of Natural Light in Tiny Homes and the Best Way to Maximize It

Tiny homes are growing in popularity and number. With each one, we improve on the previous, finding better layouts, technology and material solutions that create great value to your tiny home build or any home build with tight spaces or small dark rooms. There is no room for error in such small spaces, so researching the best products for your happiness goes a long way when making sacrifices elsewhere for the purpose of simplicity. Floor to ceiling room dividers offers some interesting fixes to the lighting problem in tiny homes. With many options for opaqueness and frame construction, these modern, perfectly constructed solutions to space and light problems also provide privacy with class and style.

As seen on Tiny House Nation, Space Plus, a division of The Sliding Door Company, defines space for clients that give function and form equal consideration.

Doors that disappear instead of swinging in or out are a great space saver for tiny homes. Glass Pocket Doors for bedrooms let in the light yet can remain private with the glass finish of your choice. All walls remain free for storage, furniture or electronics. You get two rooms when you want them and one when you don’t. The Sliding Door Company has a wide selection of materials for you to choose from to create the look you want. Frame choices are numerous and can provide one panel or many, depending on how much detail will work with your vision.

Glass Barn Doors are great for bathrooms. The light goes both ways when you have either a bright bathroom or a bright area that the room is off of. No dark corners and the light is soft for a calming interior. They can be customized to fit your doorway and with a smart closing, the system ensures no fingers are ever pinched. The closing systems on these barn doors are “smart”, slowing any door moving too fast.

Using Glass Room Dividers to separate precious interior real estate when necessary can open it up or close it off to accommodate more people or different activities. The multifunctional requirement of space in a tiny home is best served by flexibility which can be custom created with the expert team members at The Sliding Door Company.

Storage in tiny homes is always limited. Hiding components, appliances, and outdoor gear is key to not feeling cramped. As tech and gear become more and more sophisticated, the more customized your approach to exactly what it is you need to store, the greater you will maximize its benefit. Being able to hide most of what you need with a smart and sleek closet door with an opaque glass allows for easy access to everything inside.

Privacy without losing light is easily obtained in small dark rooms with frosted, smoked frosted, and other glass opacities. Mirrored sliding doors for closets are a great way to open up a room and reflect light back into it. Customize your frame choices with durable aluminum frames of various sizes and with divider strips for style.  Various locks and accessories are also available so you can accommodate any of the necessarily minimal design requirements of small spaces.                      

Most tiny space needs customization of favorite looks, especially when dealing with cabinetry and other forms of storage. What is great about the options at The Sliding Door Company is that they are modern, sleek and simple, which makes them great choices to enhance whatever look you are aiming for. The Sliding Panel Doors are great for kitchen pantries, laundry rooms, home offices, and master bathrooms.

Partition Doors are always a great way to provide flexibility for multipurpose rooms- the case for most tiny homes. Not only is ease of use important when making frequent transformations, but so is the final effect; whatever the outcome is chosen, it needs to look great.

Glass Bifold Doors are customizable for tight spots and look fantastic in all the different glass finishes. When you don’t have enough room on either side for a pocket door, these doors take up less space than a swing door, allowing for great flow.

Closets have to be precise and of course, they usually are not. Small spaces tend to be great for “reach-in” use, one sliding door toggles between exposing an organized reach-in closet/office/bar and in the other position hides it all. If you know it is never going to stay organized in there, and you know that you want to be able to constantly keep it all hidden, glass is the way to go to accommodate lighting. Reach-in closets certainly need a good lighting scheme and can be gorgeous with a contrasting interior color. Remember that bedroom closet sliding doors made of glass also let light in from the room, allowing for deep searches to be effective.

Modern, sleek and minimalistic doors are not only a great answer for tiny homes, but they are also trending for home offices, walk-in pantries, laundry rooms, bedroom closets, mudrooms, linen closets and more. Any kind of architectural style seems to just pop when matched with a minimalistic fixture. Smaller spaces are more convenient in some regards, simply because there is less to deal with, but also because there is less to look at, which these days, with so much screen time, encourages face time with friends and family.                                       

The best way to arrive at exactly what it is you want is to call The Sliding Door Company and get on the phone with one of their experts. Based on how far along you are with your vision, they will evaluate what the next steps are for you to bring it all together. Whether you have a drawing on a cocktail napkin or a schematic with actual dimensions, these experts will help you or your contractor interpret, change, finalize and execute your plan as you let in the light, invest in relevant style and enjoy your well-planned creation for years to come, knowing you had the best of resources to create your vision- both in the quality and selection of products, but also in the quality of care you experience as a customer of The Sliding Door Company. We understand that the bottom line on any project is pricing, which is why our clients benefit from our factory to field control; we fabricate everything in our own factory so the end-user gets factory direct pricing, safety, and quality they can trust.

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How To Increase The Value of Your Home With Our State-of-The-Art Products

If you want the value of your home to increase, increase the value of your home. The trick is to do so with improvements that have broad appeal. The broader the appeal of the actual structural design of your home, the greater its value. Try to not over-improve with heavy taste-specific buildouts. Ideally, leave the dominant taste and style that is unique to you for what you put in the space and how you use it. Here are some strategies that you may find could work for you and your home.

4 MAIN REASONS TO INCREASE THE VALUE OF YOUR HOME

What is the main objective behind your improvement project? Keeping this in mind while you make each decision acts as a mission statement. This way, you can test if your décor or structural choices are actually a part of the solution you are reaching for and you can be sure that they are not mistakes that will affect the marketability of your home.

1. HOME IMPROVEMENTS TO SELL YOUR HOME

If you intend to put your home on the market either now or in the future, and that is the purpose of your home improvement project, then make sure your choices are neutral. Realtors actually want to make walls disappear in smaller rooms or spaces that need to be open when they show homes. Any arrangement allowing space to be flexible, as well as neutral, will just simply solve more problems as they walk through the door in the minds of buyers. Don’t create problems with colors that have to be changed or fixtures that stand out. The objective is to get buyers to be able to visualize themselves in your house; to do so remove as much indication of the fact that you, with your taste and style, live there, not them.

2. MANAGE THE COST OF MAINTENANCE AND CREATE GREATER EFFICIENCY

Home maintenance is something that can be on a schedule to mitigate damage. Upgrading technology is actually a form of maintenance, especially with appliance life-cycles being predictably bad. When you do address your media room, office, kitchen, garage, or laundry room tech upgrades, consider how you will house components and appliances, keeping in mind the need for neutrality if you ever intend to sell your home. Configuring with flexible or glass interior walls can also help with room temperature efficiency and not take away any sense of space at the same time.

3. EXPAND OR RECONFIGURE YOUR HOME FOR INCOME SUCH AS AIR BNB

Extracting extra income out of your home is a strategy a lot of people are taking now. Homeowners who want to create a separate space for AIR BNB guests can find reconfigure solutions that are unique and neutral within our collection which can provide security and ensure safety. Flexibility is wonderful as well with this kind of arrangement which could be seasonal or sporadic.

4. EXPAND OR RECONFIGURE FOR YOUR OWN ACCOMMODATION 

Even if you don’t have any reason for home improvement other than for your own accommodation; an in-law suite or repurposed garage, great choices reveal themselves as you work with our design team to nail your vision.

BEST OPTIONS FOR HOME INVESTMENT

Other than staying on top of maintenance and technology upgrades, these are the long-held strategies for increasing your home’s marketability in just about any market. Any realtor will tell you so, and since regions dictate just how much can go into construction and labor costs, researching how to get the most value out of what you will spend on your improvement project pays off for years. We are experts at arriving at the best options for any homeowner’s intentions and we make doing so stress-free and fun.

1. CREATE OR IMPROVE AN EN-SUITE MASTER BATHROOM

Not only will creating an en-suite master bath increase the marketability of your home but doing so on the ground level of your home to accommodate easy access by avoiding stairs, you will increase it even more. Whether they are mirrors for closet doors or a sliding bathroom door this is where you want to get the most for your spend. Inserting a room divider to provide defined spaces in lofts, condos or homes creates visual privacy where needed, an extra room for guests with no major construction and a transformation in hours! Now that’s value beyond doors.

2.CREATE OR IMPROVE A KITCHEN

The evolution of kitchens keeps going in the direction of multi-purpose. Who doesn’t want to be near food? Options are endless for storage, multiple configurations and creative design that can be accentuated in a million ways. We have layout experts to help maximize space and minimize cost elegantly.

3.CREATE OR IMPROVE AN ADDITIONAL BATHROOM OR BEDROOM

Space can be tight, and we have solutions that can double the utility of any room or configuration. What our experts will help you do, is in order to maximize your home improvement investment is:

SPEND WISELY ON RELEVANT STYLE

Here are some examples of our projects that will show you how you could spend wisely on the right look for your objective:

1.COMBINE MODERN DESIGN WITH CURRENT ARCHITECTURE 

Modern is the new neutral. People are stressed and want a simple, relaxing environment with sleek and unobtrusive styles. Modern aesthetics combine great with other periods to update already existing architecture. This Glass Barn Door, for example, is a sophisticated way to update any look. Updating historical or rustic looks appeals to international dwellers as well as younger generations and barn doors hug the wall and save every inch of floor real estate.

2.ROOM DIVIDERS

The demand for room division is increasing and our Glass Room Dividers are one of the best ways to increase utility and beauty as well. One way to create corners for furniture or more wall space for visuals is to make smaller space by dividing it, like with these Black Frame Room Dividers:

3.SLIDING DOORS

Sliding doors transform space when they disappear, turning two rooms or more into one and at the same time-saving space by not intruding on either interior or exterior space. Glass Sliding Doors can have dual purposes, like a closet door in one position and a hallway or bathroom door in the other.

No matter what you have in mind, The Sliding Door Company will certainly be able to show you how to make it real, while keeping the integrity of your home and improving its value and your satisfaction. Call, email — send us whatever you want, or better yet – schedule an appointment. Let’s see what you’ve got.