Window treatments for sliding glass doors are some of the most challenging interior decorating projects. That’s because sliding doors are really nice and getting the wrong treatment may easily spoil their effect, thus turning the money spent on having such doors in a terrible waste. Sliding doors aren’t cheap, but they can add a personal touch to a home interior, they can help creating a familiar yet elegant atmosphere, therefore many homeowners consider using them in their homes. Glass is a beautiful and versatile material. Not only it can be colored and shaped in many ways, but it can also feature various degrees of transparency, thus allowing the creation of spectacular effects with the help of light. Under these circumstances, a question arises: should we cover these beautiful doors turning them into common ones, or should we let them be the central point of our interior and say good bye to our privacy?
This website aims to be a resource for introducing you to the various types of sliding glass door window treatments, so you can then make an informed choice if you wish to buy some blinds or shades to cover the windows of your sliding doors. We are by no means specialists in home decorating, so please don’t take our words for granted. We are just gathering as much information as we can, with the purpose of building a home of our own from the scratch. Since we are doing this research anyway, we thought to share it with other people. This is how this website and a few others more were born, offering tips and reviews of window treatments, interior doors, patio doors, insulation solutions, storage solutions, kitchen and bathroom fixtures or furniture choices. We are trying to illustrate the articles with photos of sliding glass door window treatments whenever we find something suitable. When our house will be built, though, we are going to publish lots of pictures with the building process, stages and final results. Until then, you are welcome to subscribe to our feed and get new articles in your inbox as soon as we publish them.
Sliding Glass Door Window Covering Ideas
Depending on whether or not you want the light filtered or even obstructed, you may choose a temporary or a permanent window covering for your sliding door. Here are a few ideas of what you can use:
Fabric window treatments
Curtains and drapes can be used on pretty much every type of window, because they are very versatile and they allow covering even arch-shaped windows without you having to pay a lot of extra money, as it happens in the case of window blinds, which go crazy expensive as soon as you step away from the classical rectangle shape. By using tiebacks, you can enjoy your sliding glass doors, but you can also have your privacy when needed. Plus, fabric can be matched with other elements of decor such as napkins or chair covers, which can be a very nice thing to do. Either you go for curtains or fabric panels, you have to make sure not to obstruct the doorway, so people can still pass from a room to another without having to lift the curtain. My best favorites in this category of window treatments are the fabric sliding panels installed on tracks. It’s true that they slide only on the horizontal, but you can have two of them for each side of the sliding door, therefore they’d take very little space when fully retracted.
Curtains have several advantages over other window treatments:
- they are easy to wash (if they can be washed in the normal washing machine, you can even do it at home; if not, you can take them to chemical cleaning services)
- they are relatively inexpensive, so they can be replaced when redecorating (if you buy expensive window blinds, you might not afford to replace them each time you feel for a change in your interior decoration style; curtains are by far cheaper, so you won’t be feeling like throwing money off the window if you replace them every couple of years or so)
- they offer a warm look to the interior
Patio and sliding glass doors window blinds and shades
This is a very good choice, and if you can afford it, it’s best to go for exquisite products like the ones from Hunter Douglas. I’m thinking here the Alustra Duette honeycomb shades, the Chalet Woods blinds or the Applause with Vertiglide series. They are far from being cheap, but they are worth the money, in both terms of beauty and functionality. As window blinds can collect a lot of dust and are quite difficult to clean, you can choose to get those glass doors which have the blinds between the glass panes. It’s an expensive option, but it gives you a great comfort, because you won’t have to deal with cleaning the blinds, nor with having them damaged because of the frequent usage of your sliding doors. This is great especially if we are talking about patio doors and if you happen to have kids who love to open and close the doors million times a day and never get bored with it.
Glass window treatments
Treating the glass can offer you excellent decorations, but you need to be aware that this is permanent, so you’ll never be able to change the way your sliding doors look and feel unless you change the glass panes. This is a costly and cumbersome task, so think very well if that’s what you really want when you decide to go for stained, frosted or etched glass or any other kind of permanent treatment.
Window film treatments
Instead of treating the glass, you can just buy those thin films that replicate glass treatments. Relatively easy to apply, when you get bored with them, you can remove them much easier. They are fairly cheap, but at a closer look, this shows. However, window films are a good idea for low budget families who want such cool effects in their home and who really can’t spend so much on their sliding glass door window treatments.