Tag: Sliding Doors Panel

New Year’s Resolutions

Interior Design Trends

Happy New Year from all of us at The Sliding Door Company! Like most, we’re overwhelmingly excited about the prospects of 2021 and hope that this year will prove to be far more relaxed, joyous, and more fruitful than the last. And just as we are, many across the country are graciously welcoming in this new year with open arms and a uniquely hopeful spirit. After the year we’ve all just endured, we find that the only direction to move is upwards. Which prompts a wonderful opportunity for each of us to define a new season of dreams, resolutions, and positive life changes moving into 2021. Need a little inspiration defining your resolutions? We’ve got you covered.

You Do You

Our advice? Stop apologizing for everything. The past year was fraught with difficulties, uncertainty, stressors, fears, and hurdles for every single one of us. Blaming yourself and feeling badly about whatever emotional, financial, or physical shape you currently find yourself in, will not help matters. The best way to move forward is to forgive yourself, reduce your internal expectations, and practice acceptance. Actively accepting things as they come into your orbit will allow you to adapt, pivot, and reorganize yourself to meet your modern demands. By being kind to yourself, and leaning into your intuition, you’ll feel a lot more filled up and relaxed moving into this new year.

Choose Health

Perhaps the best (and most common) New Year’s Resolution is a pledge to our physical bodies. Whether that means eating healthier, reducing alcohol consumption, meditating daily, starting to work out with consistency, or spending more time outdoors, all of the above are great ways to improve your well-being from the inside out. And when our bodies are at peace, so is our mind. Here are some ideas for setting yourself up for success:

Meal Planning
By sitting down and putting your dietary goals onto paper, you’ll be able to outline and define a health plan and have guidelines for how to stick to it. Make a weekly shopping list of the health food you’d like to transition to and have it handy when you head to the store to help remind you what to buy. The internet is a great recipe and dietary resource, use it to find your ideal meal planning tips and tactics.
Pick A Partner
Get a friend to partner with you for your exercise goals. That way, you’ll have not only a motivator but someone to help keep you accountable throughout the year. Even if you can’t meet in person, you can always connect online. Zoom workout sessions are super easy and fun! Plus, having someone share the challenge with you may help motivate you.
Bring the Outside In
Home gyms are a great escape during normal circumstances, but especially during these pandemic-induced limitations, being able to work-out from home is essential! If you don’t have an extra bedroom to spare, construct your own private space within a larger area of the house. By using glass wall dividers from The Sliding Door Company, you can create a fully enclosed home gym within a day! Choose between sliding room dividers, and other glass partitions available. With hundreds of unique designs, you’ll have no issue finding the perfect partitions to suit your home’s aesthetic.

Put a Hold on Procrastination!

One of the biggest struggles most of us face in our daily lives is procrastinating on the things that matter most. This can look like many things, for example; scrolling through social media rather than clocking those work hours, putting off physical exercise, procrastinating on your to-do list, and in general, becoming distracted by inconsequential happenings throughout the day. In order to hone in on a more productive workday and a more balanced home-life, think about creating a special space just for yourself, even within a bustling interior environment! To do this, you can make a home office or personal study practically out of thin air with sliding room dividers and glass wall partitions made by The Sliding Door Company. Installation takes less than a day and requires no major construction, making your interior transformation a total breeze!

With the Sliding Door Company’s glass wall partitions, the options are truly endless! Start this new year off right and stick to those resolutions. Make your interiors work for you and transform your space with the solutions you need to achieve your goals. Schedule a free consultation today with one of our team members. View our online catalog and see what glass solution suits your needs specifically!

Interior Re-Organization For The New Year

This year is finally coming to a close, despite how, for many of us, it’s felt like a lifetime since things were normal, pre-COVID. Now is the time to start thinking about what kind of interior environment you want to enter the new year in. Interior remodeling or reorganizing is a great way to emotionally reset after periods of stress, uncertainty, or change. Cleaning out closet spaces, updating your wardrobe, or even tackling a yard project are all such cathartic exercises and act as a wonderful outlet for reorganizing your mind and your goals moving into the next chapter.

When we begin to go through older items or material possessions that no longer serve us, we are able to cleanse and release attachments to pieces or times of our life that we no longer need. So if you’re interested in tackling some interior spaces this fall, good on you! And to help you through the process, we’ve put together a list of tips to help get you going! First things first.

Start Small

Start by tackling the smaller spaces first, a.k.a. closets, and bathrooms. After all, an unorganized closet is like a runaway train, there’s no telling where it’s going and when it will stop. It’s a good idea, in general, to go through your closets at least four times each year in order to stay on top of all the chaos. It’s helpful to remind yourself what clothes and other items you have to pick from, and also to decipher between what is being used and what truly isn’t. Too many of us hold onto things that we don’t ever use or wear solely because they hold a certain sentimental value. And after years of these items collecting and compounding, we wind up living amongst too much. Having too many personal items can distract one from feeling comfortable and relaxed in their own home. And who would want that? Especially during this year, when we’ve lived indoors for the majority of the day, we want our spaces to feel fresh, clean, and comfortable, not packed with messy unnecessary items. Oftentimes, we fail to recognize when we are living in chaos and why we’re feeling overwhelmed. As if this year wasn’t overwhelming enough, having an unorganized, overpacked home is definitely not a good place to call a sanctuary. So what can you do about it?

Space Savers

Pull everything out of your closet and lay it out on the floor or on your bed so that you can get a full view and understanding of everything that you’ve been holding onto. After taking it all in, systematically go through each item and put them in different piles. Make a “keeping” pile, a “donating” pile, and also a “maybe” pile. After doing several rounds of this system of organization, you’ll be able to really hone in on what items you want to keep and what you can safely ditch. And before you put them back in the closet, make sure to thoroughly clean, dust, and wipe down the surfaces so you can return your belongings to a clean environment. Additionally, you should consider installing Sliding Glass Closet Doors to replace normal front opening doors. These sleek, modern closet sliding doors add an updated aesthetic to any space while simultaneously affording you more floor area than typical swing doors. This means more space to sprawl! The Sliding Door Company crafts beautifully designed, sturdy sliding doors, Bathroom Pocket Doors, and glass wall partitions that elevate indoor environments and help families organize their interiors one solution at a time. They can be professionally installed in a matter of hours and require no construction. See, there’s no reason to put off your closet reorganization when you have the help of the experts in the field!

Deep clean

After reorganizing and restructuring your closets, donating your unwanted items, and tackling your excess goods, it’s time to deep clean those interiors! Arm yourself with all the necessary cleaning equipment such as:

rubber gloves
face mask
brooms
swiffers
glass cleaner
surface spray
disinfecting wipes
dusters

Starting with the sweeping and mopping, you’ll then work your way onto windows, surfaces, bathtubs, the kitchen counters, and so on. Starting the winter season off with a clean, well-organized home will make a huge difference this year!

Now that you have the basics for transforming your home into a clutter-free sanctuary, it’s time to get to work! For more info on the floor to ceiling wall partitions and sliding glass barn doors from The Sliding Door Company, book a free consultation with one of our representatives and start your home renovation today!

Interior Design Push For a More Sustainable Future

Interior Design Trends

As we enter into the last quarter of 2020, it feels like we’ve hit a few benchmarks however abstract or concrete they may be. Starting this year out with unprecedented climate protests around the world, it became evident that there is no time left to wait. Climate change is an all-consuming, rapidly affecting issue that we must take action against. As many have found, the transition to a more sustainable lifestyle is not a difficult one. A personal evolution of purchasing behavior and daily consciousness is all it really takes to effect positive change.
So as an interior designer in America, how can you meet the modern demand for more sustainable home goods and decor when curating a client’s home? How can you source eco-friendly products and materials, and incorporate designers that craft sustainably? Research helps. Word of mouth is also great. But research can only take you so far when you know what you’re looking for. That’s why we’ve put together a list of things to look for when researching, sourcing, and communicating about environmentally intelligent home goods and decor. Below, we’ll go over the basics, from Material Sourcing to Relationships with Local Artisans, Relative Cost, and more.

Qubiglass workstations with sliding glass room dividers

Material Sourcing

As a designer, you know that one of the main tasks of your profession is material sourcing. Your insider abilities are essentially your bread and butter. Within a whole world of textiles, materials, furnishings, and art, it’s up to you to make the best sourcing decisions and think for your client’s needs, tastes, and their best interests. More than just knowing where to source your goods from, you must know about the goods themselves. Distinguishing factors such as thread count, bamboo versus cotton, real wood versus synthetic wood, chemical-free or cost-effective? These are everyday considerations you make while material sourcing. Now, with a sustainable lens placed over your work, you have a whole extra set of considerations, worries, and awareness guiding your search. Here is what to look for:

Textiles

When sourcing textiles, try to stay away from plastic-based “synthetic” fibers. Oftentimes, department stores such as Target or Walmart will carry pillows or blankets made with synthetic fibers that are heavily processed and will literally off-gas chemicals into your home and into your body.
“Toxicity is the degree to which a substance can damage an organism. Whenever we go shopping for our clothes, we don’t know how toxic and harmful that piece of fabric could be for our health. Neither do we think of its origin nor its manufacturing process and the toxic load on our body and on the environment… because of many properties like wrinkle resistance, easy to wash, easy to store but most of them are manufactured with tons of chemicals. These are highly toxic and are increasing the negative effects on our health. These synthetic fabrics also pose a serious threat to ecological balance.” -Sunita Bhalla, Department of Fashion Designing, PCM S.D. College for Women, India
The same is true for furnishing textiles. Synthetic fabrics are used widely in drapes, pillow covers, throw blankets, tablecloths, rugs, and more. Harmful to our physical and mental health, as well as the environment, these chemical textiles are quickly being replaced by safer options. Returning to the basics of material sourcing, choose from natural fibers like wool, cotton, jute, and silk, we can safeguard ourselves against chemical toxification, allergic reactions, and environmental damage.

Processing

Material processing is perhaps the largest contributing factor to water waste in the textile industry. Heavily processed synthetic materials, and even some natural fibers like cotton, require millions of gallons of freshwater each day in order to process these fabrics. Fast growth alternatives like bamboo or hemp not only solve a resource issue, but they also require up to 10x less water during processing.

Lifetime/durability

Most of our cotton or synthetic fabrics don’t last as long as we would hope. Especially in the interior design industry, this is a crucial factor when sourcing materials and furnishings that get high use, or are exposed to harsh weather. Most outdoor furniture today is made with a lot of plastic and synthetic coverings that claim to be water-resistant and durable. Yet these end up lasting only a season or two before the wear starts to show. Hemp and Bamboo are two of the strongest fibers available, while also being regenerative, sustainable, and cost-effective!
Sourcing larger interior goods like sliding doors from American-assembled companies like The Sliding Door Company oftentimes means enhanced durability and longevity. With 17 showrooms scattered all throughout every major U.S. city, it’s no far trek to source your client’s glass wall partitions and sliding room dividers from inside the country. These spatial solutions are beautifully crafted and built to last, while also providing easy-to-install solutions that require no major construction! A win-win for you, your clients, and the planet.

Where Are You Sourcing From?

One of the newest considerations is the location of your wholesaler. Are they local to your area or your client’s area? Supporting local makers and artists is a fast-growing trend that won’t slow anytime soon. By buying local and sourcing your interior art and furnishings, construction materials, and spatial dividers from companies, brands, and individuals in your city, you sustain smaller businesses and don’t require environmentally harmful shipping and handling from outside the U.S.
Check out The Sliding Door Company online today for an assortment of sliding barn doors, accessories, and other customizable options to suit your design needs.

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