Ikea Sliding Door for Sleeping Alcove Tight Spaces

Materials: Pax 150cm Sliding Door Grey

Description: When moving into my second Stockholm apartment in Sweden I realized that the entire place needed a renovation. One of the things that caught my eye was the sleeping area (Sovalkove in Swedish).

This was approximately 2m wide by about 180cm in depth and was right beside the bathroom, in fact the door to the bathroom was from the sleeping alcove. As the prices of apartments in the city center are roundabout 7000 pounds per square meter, space is at a premium.

Being able to create two rooms where there was only one open area would not only give one that little bit of extra privacy but also allow visitors to sleep over in the main room and afford them a little bit of privacy for themselves.

Before: The bathroom is located behind the TV wall, with a door on the left side leading to it. This door was relocated to be facing the living room. An additional room created with the PAX doors as a guest room. 

It was clear that the first thing that needed to be done was to relocate the door to the bathroom to face the main living area and after that to install some type of door system to enclose this alcove space into its own room. In the before photo you can see how the sleeping area looked like before, with the brown door that leads to the bathroom.

When looking into possible solutions, I found that a sliding door system would fit my purposes but the costs of custom built sliding door solutions (the width required was 130cm) was prohibitive.

After searching via the web (and ikea hackers actually) I decided to try the the PAX sliding wardrobe solution.

The smallest PAX door is 150cm which is about 20cm too wide for my space but for me having a bit of overlap in the door is not such a huge concern and with the grey doors actually creates an interesting effect with the translucency.

What did turn out to be a concern is the mounting of this solution after all the guide rails were installed. It turned out to be somewhat difficult to mount the door without completely pushing aside the first door but after some trial and error it finally worked.

The setup only cost me 1700 SEK (regular price is 3700sek) as I had purchased all my kitchen at Ikea and this gave me a gift card which I put towards the price of the doors.

On top of this, in Stockholm the delivery company BRING is working with Ikea to deliver purchases for customers whom don't have vehicles available to them. The surprising part is that no matter how much you purchase, the cost is the same, 495 SEK to the Stockholm city area. This is about 50 pounds and I took advantage of this to the tune of about 400kg of goods that were delivered to me in a single go.

All in all, I would definitely recommend the PAX solution with their attractive finishes that will work with most decors, the cost competitive nature of the doors themselves and the versatility.



~ Oz, Stockholm, Sweden