Installing Pocket Door Hardware in Standard Doors

When designed our house, we quickly learned the glory of the pocket door.  They open a space up tremendously and render less wall space unusable.  If your home has door opening that accommodate it, pocket doors can really open up the space. 

A few things to consider before installing pocket doors—will you need your doors to lock?  Yes, this can be done but will add some overhead hardware wise requiring a locking mechanism in either the wall or the floor.  We opted to not have locking doors—it’s just my boyfriend and I and we rarely have situations when doors need to be shut much less locked.  We opted for two opposing bedroom pocket doors on either side of the bridge in our home.  Surprisingly, finding the doors and installing the rail hardware was the easy part, but finding hardware to open and close the doors was the much more challenging task.

We used solid core wood doors found at a local building supply recycler.  The word from them was that they used to belong to Kanye West!  Using solid core doors cut down on sound but add quite a bit of bulk and weight to the door.  Opening and closing the doors was a herculean task before we got the right hardware.  And using recycled doors meant that they already had knob and lock mechanism holes in them.  Thus we needed to find a solution that would fill the existing holes and allows us to easily open and close the doors. 

We bought two solid brass flush pulls for either side of each doorknob holes, but they are a bit too shallow to get enough of a grip to pull the door completely in from either side.  For the edge of the doors we bought pocket door edge pulls, a bit more narrow and taller that the existing holes, but easy to install. 

Inserting Flush Pulls

If you measured correctly, the pulls should fit exactly in the existing holes.  In our case we needed to use a hammer to get them all the way in.

Installing Edge Pulls

The most useful tool for this job (and pretty much every other job in our home) is a Dremel set.  The wood grinding wheels will help you create the right size opening for the edge pull.  You need to make sure there is enough space inside for the entire pull when extended.

Patching the Hole

Once the right space is created, the edge pull will easily install with two screws.  The harder part is using wood filer to patch the holes on the side without the allowing the wood filler to fall in and gum up the pull mechanism.

But after an hour or so of meticulous cutting and filing, we had some pretty kick-ass pocket door hardware installed.