In the living room we have double doors that lead into the patio. Which is great, except the doors open inwards, and they’re pretty big doors, so they take up a lot of valuable space in the living room. Here’s and old pic where the door is sort of open (on the far right):

Especially aggravating is the fact that, as you can see above, the one you opened was the one on the right, so it (almost) touched the chair on the far side of the dining table. Here’s another pic (note to self, I really need to learn how to take pics of windows):

My initial, crazy idea was to somehow convert them into sliding doors. I wasn’t sure how much it would cost (I’m guessing a lot) or if it was even possible. Then Andoni pointed out that even if we were able to do that, we wouldn’t be able to have both of them open at the same time, and since it’s a very useful opening for getting things in and out of the apartment – for example our bed we brought it in the front door, out that way into the patio, and then in again from the patio into our bedroom – I realized sliding doors were out (our wallets thanked us).

But my head was still thinking about it. The part that really bothered me was the fact that it was the right door that opened/had the handle (you can open both of them, but really, unless we’re having a lot of people over we just use the one with the handle). The flow was all wrong as you can see above, you didn’t have a clear pathway from the entryway to the door. If we could somehow switch them so that the left one opened instead of the right one, it would make a lot more sense, I thought.

I asked around to see if doors are switchable, and guess what? At least ours, they are! So we switched them. Now the left one has the handle and opens to the left, towards the sofa. Obviously when switching them we also had to flip them (the top is now on the bottom, so to speak) and therefore the handle is upside down.

I can’t give you a step by step of how we did it because, frankly, my uncle and Andoni did it while I was helping my aunt with some stuff so I didn’t really pay attention. The short version is that they removed the glass panels, flipped the doors upside down, switched them (and the hardware) and reinstalled everything.

I still wanted to post this because it might help someone out there think outside the box. It never would have occurred to me to question which ways the doors open or if they’re interchangeable, but it turns out at least some of them are. And yes, the handle is upside down and kinda looks like it’s flipping us the finger, but we have plans of inspecting it to see if that can be switched, too, or just buying another one. For now, though, it works a lot better than it used to, and it cost us exactly 0€. So, what do you guys think? Is the flow better now?

What do you think? Share your opinion in the comments.