This quick “hack” opens up your spaces and makes them feel so much bigger! I realized years ago that there were plenty of doors in our house that we never closed. I started to ask myself, can I just…remove them? Am I even allowed to do that?
The answer is yes…yes you are. 😉 This is a great trick that will give you more space even if you’re renting a home. Just take care when removing the door and store it under a bed so it won’t get damaged.
**I recommend keeping bedroom doors up for safety reasons. This is why we sleep with our doors closed.
I’ve done this so many times over the years, I even had a few doors removed when we built our house. There’s only one door I’ve taken down since we moved in — on the water closet in our master bath:
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It’s not a big space to begin with, so taking the door down made a HUGE difference.
I don’t have a full before pic but this gives you an idea how much space it took up:
Since we have a door to the main bath, we didn’t feel it was necessary to keep this one. We haven’t missed it once!
I removed the door from our old mud room to the rest of the house and it made a HUGE difference in there:
This was a door we didn’t close once…so it was an easy decision.
Obviously a lot more than that happened in this room over the years, but you can see that the line of sight is so much nicer!:
Light and bright beadboard mud room
I feel like I gain ten square feet of space in our house every time I do it!
Removing the door was a given on the book nook I created as well:
Bedroom closets are a great place to remove a door — especially if you can only access them through a bathroom. (They won’t be seen by anyone but you!)
I removed the door on our old closet and we loved it:
You don’t physically gain that much space, but visually it makes all the difference in the world!
We removed the door to the basement in our last house just a few years after moving in:
I don’t have a before picture, but just imagine the door swinging open to the right…after I took it down we really did gain space in the family room.
I remembered that for our new home and didn’t have one added to our basement stairs:
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I also kept the doorway between our mud room and the kitchen open as well:
See how to use the empty space on the side of your fridge here!
It’s all up to your preference and how you live in your spaces!
Our upstairs bath is segmented into two smaller rooms, so I had the door removed and the opening framed out instead. Otherwise the door would have been open all of the time and blocking the natural light from a window.
**If you are building a home, keep in mind you can have pocket doors installed instead! Those require structural changes you need to make early in the process, so they are difficult to add after the fact.
I know you’re thinking…what do I do with the holes after the door is down? You can just live with them if they don’t bother you. (I still haven’t covered the frame in our master bathroom!)
Or you can use inexpensive trim to cover where the door hung:
Are there doors in your home you never use? Remove one and see how you like it! All it takes to remove a door is a Phillips screwdriver, and perhaps a flat head screwdriver to pry the hinges off.
See more of our home here.
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