Explore our living room renovation with a new sliding glass door for seamless indoor-outdoor living—perfect for entertaining! Check out our transformation journey.
When we went to renovate our living room, we raised the floor in order to convert the room to a long dining room. The new living room will be an addition once we get to it.
The plan is to have a deck and be able to open the sliding glass door during parties so we can have people sitting both outside and inside, doubling our seating area.
We had two windows in this area and even with the raised floor, it was the perfect height for a sliding glass door. We didn’t need to do any structural changes to the building in order to install this so it ended up being an easy project, although we did hire a contractor to do the work.
This was part of our major living room renovation project and again it will be a dining room eventually, but for now, we’re using it as a living room.
I’m going to share the progress photos and some details about what they did for the project, but we didn’t DIY this one.
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Please read the whole post so you don’t miss any important information!
Why Replace Windows with a Door?
- The doors let in additional light.
- Additional access to deck and the outdoors.
- Creates a smoother flow of traffic for parties and when guests are over.
- Creates a two part seating area for dining when there are a lot of people present: an indoor and outdoor section without being too far away from each other.
The downsides include the cost of the work: repairing the drywall, the siding, adding trim, and the cost of the door itself. You may also find that there’s a greater loss of electricity- but in our case, the windows probably weren’t doing a great job so the door likely won’t be worse.
You also lose wall space when you add a door versus windows, and it’s another area to add a pool alarm as well.
Process Photos and Description
The first thing they did was raise the floor because that was necessary before getting all of this started.
They needed to move the vent on the floor and reroute it to the side of the sliding glass door that was stationary.
At this point it was pretty deep into the winter and really cold… So they needed to remove both of the windows, cut out the opening, and placed the door all in one day.
During the process they did figure out that those two windows were rotting… Which is a little concerning seeing our other windows might be too. We’re going to ignore that for now. Windows are expensive.
If you are open to storing them for a bit, it’s worth keeping the windows for a DIY greenhouse or to sell used, even if part of it’s rotten. A lot of people like them for home projects and will pick them up free or for a low fee.
Once they got the cut out they placed the door and did all the framing and the trim.
They also needed to add a gate to the other side because there isn’t a stairwell or deck there yet. This is a temporary measure that will get removed when we put a deck on.
They also needed to add electric on the exterior for a patio light, as well as a switch on the inside to turn it on and off. Where we don’t have a deck there yet, we could have waited, but it made more sense to do it now when everything was open and accessible to the electrician.
They did a lot of repairs on the exterior of the house because they needed to cut away the siding. This meant that they needed to repair the Hardie board siding, and add trim around the door on both the exterior and the interior.
The trim was painted and eventually the walls were painted as well to match the rest of the rooms.
I didn’t anticipate how much I would enjoy having this sliding glass door here. I know it’s something that will be awesome once we have converted this to a dining room and have a deck outside, but it’s brightened up the room a lot just as it is.
We spend a lot of time sitting in front of the fireplace, and often leave the door open with the screen door closed in nice weather. It’s lovely.
I’m looking forward to how amazing this is going to be once we finally finish the full scope of our project.
This is it once the whole room was (mostly) finished. As I said in my other posts about this renovation project, we’re still working on trying to find a good flooring alternative.
Other posts about our living room renovation:
- Replaced the Wood Fireplace with Electric
- Added a Sliding Glass Door to the Future Deck
- Removing the Half Wall
- Raising the Living Room Floor
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