Fit a Sliding Wardrobe Door With Spaceslide Mirror Panels in 7 Steps for 30% More Light

Why the gap between floor and ceiling decides everything

Measure the opening at three heights and three widths before ordering. Spaceslide cuts doors to your supplied measurement, so a 12mm error in the height you give them is a 12mm error you live with for the life of the wardrobe. The standard reveal they work to assumes a level floor and a flat ceiling, and very few rooms built before 2000 have either. Lay a 2m spirit level across the floor where the bottom track will sit. If one end reads 6mm to 8mm high, that slope transfers directly into the door, and a mirror door that is 6mm out of plumb shows it instantly because the reflected vertical line of a doorframe behind you leans visibly.

The practical move is to take the height from the lowest point of the floor, not an average. Spaceslide’s online configurator asks for a single height figure per opening; give it the shortest measurement and pack the high side later. Width matters less for fit, since the doors overlap in the centre, but an opening that tapers more than 10mm top to bottom will leave a wedge of shadow at one edge. For openings wider than 2.4m, three doors run more smoothly than two oversized panels, because each individual door stays under the 1m width where the bottom rollers start to drag on deeper-pile carpet.

Step one through three: track, packing, and the carpet question

The top track screws to the ceiling or to a fixed timber pelmet, and it carries no weight beyond keeping the doors from tipping forward. All the load sits on the bottom track, which is why that piece has to be dead level even when the floor is not. Run the bottom track first. Lay it dry, drop the level on it, and slide thin plastic packers under the low end until the bubble centres. Builders’ merchants sell these in 1mm, 2mm, 3mm and 5mm steps; stacking three 2mm packers gives a cleaner result than forcing a single shim because the load spreads.

Carpet is the recurring problem. On a fitted carpet with a foam underlay, the bottom track wants to compress one side over the first few weeks, which throws the level you so carefully set. Two options work. Either lift a strip of carpet and underlay along the track line and screw straight to the floorboards or a hard subfloor, or fit the track onto a 6mm to 9mm hardwood or plywood batten that you have already screwed down through the carpet into the joists. The batten route keeps the carpet intact and gives a firm bearing. Either way, the top track goes up last, plumbed down from the bottom one with a long level or a chalked plumb line, not measured independently from the ceiling, because the ceiling is rarely parallel to the floor it sits above.

Step four: hanging the doors without chipping the mirror edge

Lift the first door into the top track at an angle, locating the top guide wheels into the channel before swinging the base in over the bottom track. Spaceslide ships the mirror doors with a protective film still on the glass face; leave it on through the whole hang. The vulnerable point is the bottom corner of the glass, which can clip the aluminium track edge if you let the door drop too fast. Keep one hand under the base and lower it the last few centimetres by feel.

The back door goes in first, then the front, because the front door runs on the channel nearest you and you need clear access to seat the rear one. Once both are in, slide each to its closed position and check the meeting edge. A good closed door sits with its vertical edge parallel to the wall return, gap top and bottom equal. If the gap tapers, the adjustment is at the bottom rollers, not the track.

Adjusters

Every Spaceslide bottom roller has a height adjustment screw reachable from the front face of the door with the supplied 4mm Allen key. Turning it raises or drops that corner by up to 12mm, which is how you correct a leaning mirror after the doors are hung.

Step five and six: levelling the hung door and setting soft-close

A mirror door telegraphs its own errors. Stand a 1m level against the leading vertical edge of the closed door. If the bubble sits off-centre, the door leans, and you fix it through the two bottom roller screws, one near each end of the base rail. Raising the low end a turn at a time brings the vertical true. Work in quarter turns and re-check between each, because the door pivots about its other roller and a half turn often overshoots. Aim for the vertical edge plumb and the gap to the side wall even from skirting to top track.

The soft-close dampers, where fitted, clip into the bottom track at each end and catch a small trigger on the door base over the final 80mm to 100mm of travel. They only engage if the door arrives at the right speed and the trigger is at the matching height, so set door height first and dampers second. If a door bounces back off the damper instead of easing in, the trigger is sitting too low and missing the catch; raise that corner one quarter turn. If the door slams through without slowing, the damper has not been pushed fully into its seat in the track. These two faults account for most of the back-and-forth on a first install, and both are mechanical, not a sign the doors are wrong.

Brush-pile strips run down the meeting edges and along the side returns to cut draughts and stop the doors rattling against the frame. They press into a slot in the door edge and should be trimmed flush at top and bottom with a sharp knife so they do not foul the tracks. A door that drags or squeaks after everything else is level usually has a brush strip riding proud at one end.

Step seven: the reveal, and why the mirror earns its place

Peel the protective film only once both doors run cleanly end to end and the soft-close behaves. Pull it slowly from a top corner at a shallow angle to avoid static streaks, and clean the glass with a microfibre cloth and a vinegar-and-water mix rather than an ammonia spray, which over time attacks the silvered backing at exposed edges.

A full-height mirror door changes the light in a small bedroom in a way that is easy to underclaim and easy to overclaim. A 2.3m tall reflective panel facing a window returns a large share of the daylight that a matt or panelled door would have swallowed, and a north-facing room with one window gains the most because it has the least light to start with. The effect depends entirely on what the mirror faces. Put it opposite the window and the room reads markedly brighter through the afternoon; put it on the same wall as the window, facing a dark corner, and it reflects the dark corner. The 30 percent figure quoted in marketing for these doors is a best-case for a mirror sited directly across from a glazed opening, and it is not a number you should expect in a room where the door faces a blank wall.

The other gain is depth. A mirror at the end of a narrow room doubles the apparent run, which is why estate-agent staging leans on them. That same property is a liability if the mirror reflects clutter or a doorway into a hall, because the eye reads the reflected mess at full size.

The question worth sitting with before you order is which wall the door will actually face once the bed and the window are fixed, because the glass cannot be repositioned after the track is screwed down, and a mirror pointed at the wrong half of the room gives back exactly what you show it.