Blog

Medical Screens, Partitions and Privacy

The importance of privacy and relaxing spaces within medical facilities and hospitals is becoming more and more substantial. Spatial separation and privacy are now valued and understood more than in previous years. The impact that the environment plays into the recovery time and the overall happiness of patients is undeniable. More and more studies are concluding that patients in medical centers require a certain amount of space, security, and respectful privacy during their healing in order to stay healthy and recover. Environment-induced stress can have extremely harmful effects on patients, delaying recovery and in some cases, worsening their medical ailments.

Private medical screens modern check up rooms with nurses and doctors passing by

Medical Screens

Of course, a lot of the medical practices and related activities involved in patient treatment and care require privacy and solitude. For example, medical screening is typically a relatively quick process, that requires total privacy and patient trust. Medical screens help to make these testing/screening zones as comfortable and as private as possible, all while working within an overcrowded indoor environment. Pharmacies use medical privacy screens, sliding room dividers, and flexible frosted or opaque glass wall partitions to provide a privacy solution. Pop-up pharmacies or ones which exist in larger buildings such as a Rite-Aid, or CVS need to ensure their patients are getting the privacy they need when they need it, without requiring a trip to a hospital. 

Partitions

The difference between a solid wall partition versus a semi-translucent or see-through glass wall partition is tremendous in the medical field. Whether a nurse, doctor, physician, or the patient themself, being stuck inside a hospital can be exceptionally depressive. If there is little natural light permeating through the facilities, it can often feel like you’re stuck inside a maze of illness and injury with little visible hope in sight. Bringing in more natural light, and granting patients the pleasure of enhanced visibility, can make all the difference. Integrating glass wall partitions, interior glass doors, and will help bring in and reflect light throughout rooms. Clinics and hospitals, regardless of size or stature, can tend to have a sad connotation attached to them, often feel as though they were built underground, these environments are the least conducive to recovery. Fluorescent lighting and limited visibility are exceptionally burdensome for those stuck inside. Increasing natural light flow is a great way to increase the quality of life within medical centers.

Privacy Matters

Though a lot of hospitals are oversaturated and burdened by our taxed medical system, there is no reason for patients to be existing on top of one another as we see today. Suffering from a medical condition, illness, injury or disease is already troublesome and stressful enough. Physically taxing, as well as mentally stressful, these patients don’t need to be wrought with more trauma. Privacy is a crucial component in rest and recovery. Without it, patient recovery will only delay turnover further and cause the overcrowding of medical facilities. By integrating increased spatial distinction throughout wellness centers and hospitals, we can expect to see faster and healthier recoveries. Wall partitions and floor to ceiling room dividers offer flexibility to be moved around or rearranged when needed, and require no major construction. The necessity to provide our sick with adequate privacy and a relaxing atmosphere is paramount at this point.

Due to current global health circumstances, we find it to be an exceptionally critical time to carefully consider medical center hospitals. The impending burden these facilities will experience calls for interior upgrades and conscious thought surrounds the success of patient recovery. The overall quality and design of these centers will play a large role in turnover time. With all of the above considerations and examples, hopefully, your medical center can blossom into a safe and inviting sanctuary for those in need of medical attention. For more inspiration and space-optimizing solutions, plan a visit to our closest location. Visit Us Online to browse our online viewing catalog and Enjoy A Free Consultation from one of our team members to actualize your vision today!

Blog

Stay At Home Parents, It’s Your Time

As a stay at home parent, there can be a lot of hours in the day just waiting to be filled. This can pose a troubling series of questions for those not sure what to do with all of this novel free time. While raising children can be undeniably taxing, there are, of course, school hours and extracurricular activities that take them out of the house and leave you with ample time to sink into a project. Once your child (ren) head off to school, your entire day all of a sudden opens up and presents you with (at times) a stifling existential question- what exactly should I do with mytime?

If you’ve felt this way before, you’re not alone. This is a very common occurrence for stay at home parents that presents a wonderful opportunity to get creative. This is a chance for you to deeply consider what activities, hobbies or skills you’d like to learn or improve upon. Taking time and money into account, we’ve outlined a few creative options to consider during your process.

Home Daycare

If you love kids, which, there’s a high likelihood (seeing as how you’re a stay at home parent), consider starting your own at-home daycare for little ones. This is an excellent way to spend your daytime/morning hours after your own children head off to school (or before they’re in school) where you can be at home, and run a business at the same time. You can easily and affordably build your own home daycare by employing a few spatial optimization solutions and techniques that cost very little and don’t require any major construction. Convert a wing of your home into this daycare by installing sliding wall doors, a barn door room divider or glass wall partitions to enact space separation within a comfortable setting. These spatial solutions are super handy and provide the needed flexibility to account for expansion or deconstruction if you decide to end the daycare business. You’ll be helping out so many parents, and simultaneously growing your community and making friends with other parents. Sometimes being a stay at home parent can feel limiting and can cause a separation from the important adult interaction that parents with 9-5 jobs enjoy. Owning a home daycare will put you in touch with other parents and babysitters and will expand your interactions ten-fold. It also could be a great way for your children to meet new kids.

Personal Business/Startup

Having your children head off to school for the majority of the workday presents a brilliant opportunity to develop your own business doing something you love and working with other adults in doing so. Perhaps your new business is an exciting startup that will take a few years to grow momentum- the perfect circumstance for your lifestyle. Turn a room in your house into a home office or use frosted glass wall partitions to craft an entirely new room or freestanding office space within your home. Choose from six different glass opacities to achieve your desired level of privacy when constructing this office space. This will save you a commute and the cost of renting out an office. Allowing you the flexibility to still drop off and pick up your kids whenever needed, and work from the comfort of your own home.

Yoga Teacher Training/ Fitness Specialist

Have you always secretly dreamt about getting wildly in-shape or even becoming a fitness instructor? Now is the time to actualize these goals that used to be mere fantasies. Starting the yoga teacher training process is actually a lot easier than most people expect and will endow you with a skill set that you can use and enjoy for the rest of your life. Once you acquire this certification, you can teach yoga and integrate your practice into your everyday life. Perhaps you’ve always dreamt of becoming a fitness specialist or a nutritionist. Consider turning one of your rooms into a workout/fitness/yoga studio. Install mirror sliding doors (such as mirrored closet doors) to get the visibility you’ll need when starting this fitness venture. For a relatively simple room upgrade, you’ll craft a health and wellness sanctuary from your own home.

Take the time to look within and ask yourself what path you’d like to go down with the years you have ahead. With your abundance of unique free time, you can accomplish anything you set your mind to. By employing some creative spatial solutions, you’ll set yourself up to utilize your home in a way you never thought you could. For more exciting solutions and inspirations on your home (and lifestyle) transformation, The Sliding Door Company has everything you’ll need. Visit Us Online to browse our online viewing catalog and Enjoy A Free Consultation from one of our team members to actualize your dreams today!

Blog

Crafting the Perfect Workspace from Home

With a rapidly evolving definition of what it is to be a modern-day worker, so evolves our working environment. Whether you work from a computer, make art for a living, work as a physical therapist or bodyworker, teacher/tutor, travel agent, or even a hairstylist- all of these professions are ones that you can likely do from home.

Understandably, it is far more environmentally friendly working from home rather than going to an office day in and day out. Slash your daily CO2 emissions by saving yourself (and the planet) your taxing commute- nothing is worse than sitting in traffic while your car pumps out exhaust and adds to our growing carbon footprint. Other benefits, such as making use of your own kitchen rather than eating out every lunch, and (assuming every room in your home has a window), utilizing natural light rather than burning bulbs in a windowless office. Many are making the move towards working from home because if you can maintain productivity, it just makes a lot more sense. If you don’t necessarily need to be in the office five days a week, why not get creative and make your morning commute a thirty-second shuffle into the next room?

With a little planning and some tips from the space optimizing experts, you’ll be on your way to making a productive studio or home office in no time. Considering time, effort and budget as important factors in this transformation, we have outlined some helpful ideas to get you started.

Pick A Room

  • First things first- picking the right room of said home office or studio space. Important factors to consider are natural lighting, feasibility, size, storage capability, coziness, and foot-traffic flow surrounding the space. You certainly don’t want to select an unused room in your house that is dark and miserable to be in unless you feel you can effectively brighten it up with the right lighting. Which is, of course, a viable option. Generally though, air on the side of the brighter, the better when selecting your office room. Consider the fact that you’ll be indoors for the majority of prime daylight hours. This means you’ll quickly feel trapped inside and maybe even start to feel tired and lethargic if your chosen room is too dark and bearing little visibility to the outside world.
  • In terms of feasibility, were talking, “is this room already full of junk and storage spillover?” If the answer is yes, don’t pick that room unless you can find viable storage options for all of your existing material goods. This office has to work with you, not you work around it.
  • How large or small is the room? If you think you can squeeze all of your necessary staples- computers, a desk, filing cabinet, art supplies, exercise equipment, what have you- in it, then great. If you’re experiencing a bit of trepidation, perhaps consider a different room or swapping rooms with one that has more square footage to accommodate all of your needs.
  • How much distracting foot-traffic does your chosen room experience on a daily basis? If you have children, you should consider if it is within audible distance to their normal playtime spots, shouts or screams. Maybe you have roommates and they move around the house frequently, creating loud noises and therefore disturbing your workflow and potential clients that come to visit. All of these are very important considerations when first setting out to select the perfect room.

Craft A New Room

If there is no extra room available, luckily there are a few relatively simple solutions for you to employ. Find a relatively open space in your house that gets little use, and hopefully, comes with good lighting. Once you’ve found it, envision installing beautiful frosted glass wall partitions, or even sliding glass room dividers to craft entirely novel rooms out of nothing! With minimal installation, you save the cost, permanence, and inconvenience of serious construction. This solution offers you the flexibility to take down or rearrange your partitions and room dividers at any time. Our interior frosted glass doors and frosted wall dividers are the perfect medium of function and privacy all while allowing ample light to pass through. With a multitude of glass opacities, frame finishes, and available accessories, we provide all the customization options you could possibly need to make this space a working sanctuary.

Make It A Sanctuary

Remember: this workspace is about to be your little slice of solitude for the foreseeable future. Better make it as cozy, comfortable, and as conducive to productivity as possible. Again, we encourage you to embrace all the natural light and outside vistas available. This will help bring the outside in and make you feel that you’re not trapped indoors all day. After the sun goes down, you’ll need lighting- plenty of it. Make sure you’re well equipped to see into the late afternoon/ early evening hours- especially in the winter months. Floor lamps and spotlighting are a big help to make your space feel cozy and, in comparison to ceiling fluorescents which can make a space feel sterile. Try to integrate greenery and house-plants throughout your home office so as to breed fresh air, stimulate the senses, and craft somewhat of an alive sanctuary to create in. Make sure you get creative and wise about your storage. A great way to bring in more light while getting a handle on storage is to replace your existing closet doors with stylish sliding mirrored closet doors. This will effectively bounce back so much wonderful light throughout your office while creating the illusion that the room is larger than it actually is. An inexpensive win-win. Lastly, while dreaming up interior decorating schemes and design ideas for your new workplace, take it upon yourself to utilize your biggest and most helpful resource- the internet. Look to Pinterest, Etsy, or any online design mag to garner inspiration for your new interior space. This is a great way to craft vision boards and get novel ideas from existing designs.

With the above suggestions and helpful tips, we hope your transition to working from home is as enjoyable as possible. The Sliding Door Company has all the creative solutions you need moving forward with your exciting new project. Don’t hesitate to check out our website, which offers a myriad of design examples, photos, accessory options, and customizable choices. Get in touch with one of our knowledgeable representatives by scheduling a free consultation and start the transformation today!