Home Design: How to Handle Door Placement

Where people put doors will control the flow of traffic through a house and determine how individual rooms function. At best, poorly placed doors can be annoying. At worst, they are a safety hazard. Usually door placement is a matter of code and most builders place them correctly. But leafing through magazines that offer building plans for sale, I sometimes find blunders. Or I see a house (like mine) that has them anyway. Once in awhile a do-it-yourself project actually creates bad door placement because the person doing the project doesn’t see the problem until it is too late. Here are some rules of thumb that can help you keep the Door Monster at bay:

1. A door should never open into another door. (This includes bathroom shower doors and appliances with doors such as a range or refrigerator.)

2. A door should never open into a primary traffic area such as a hallway or the foot of a staircase.

3. A door should never direct the flow of traffic through the middle of a major living space or work area.

If you are building a home from the ground up, check your plan to make sure the doors are properly and safely situated. Be sure to check the placement of major appliances in your kitchen and shower doors in your bathrooms. If you find poor door placement, ask for changes early in the game. With an existing structure, if you can’t eliminate or relocate the offending door, try rearranging the room’s contents to compensate for the problem.

My own kitchen was a Frankenstein. It measures 11′ 8″ x 7′ 6″. Not princely, but enough for a nice kitchen, if it were well designed. Alas, whoever drew my house plan was not thinking clearly. Or else had criminal intent. Kitchens should be dead-ended with traffic flow routed around them. Improper door placement turned my kitchen into a corridor with appliances. It even forced doors of our major appliances to open directly into work areas and against each other. (See companion diagram.)

For example, our refrigerator door opened directly into the main traffic area as well as the workspace at the kitchen sink. A person working at the sink literally had to leave the room if someone else wanted a snack or a can of soda. It also opened against the dishwasher door, meaning anybody who wanted to use either appliance had to take a number and wait his turn.

Worse, traffic from the back yard and garage was routed straight through the middle of the kitchen to the rest of the house. In fact, the back door is the only access from the garage into the house, so people come and go a lot.

Absurdly, the kitchen range was behind the back door. If the back door opened unexpectedly, anyone standing at the stove got a doorknob in the spine. Woe be to the poor soul who held a pot of boiling pasta or was taking a pan of brownies out of the oven. The only way we cooked safely in this kitchen was to lock the back door. Since the back door is the only access from the garage into the house, I couldn’t get rid of the thing, and there is nowhere else to put it without a major structural overhaul.

THE WAY IT SHOULD BE:

Because of the expense, we have had to remodel our kitchen in stages. At first, we simply changed the hinges so the refrigerator door opened away from the sink. Which helped. But the adjustment didn’t solve the dangerous situation with the stove. Reaching for my trusty tape measure, I realized that the refrigerator would fit exactly in the stove’s space. So I hollered for my sons, and we switched them around. Now the back door opens into the same area as the refrigerator door, but the situation is much less dangerous. If anyone enters from the garage, the person at the refrigerator can quickly close its door and step back. We no longer fear bruised spines nor the risk of getting scalded.

The change also created two distinct work areas that foot traffic can move between. A person entering from the garage can pass the stove without disturbing the chef, even when the oven door is open. The dishwasher and oven doors can be open at the same time with a bit of room to spare. Of course, the change meant hiring an electrician to rewire the stove outlet. But the expense enormously improved kitchen function and safety.

The change made one thing clear, however. The eating bar roadblock must go so that traffic will have a straight shot from the garage into the rest of the house. That’s the next phase of the remodel. The bar was never useful and will not be missed. Stock cabinets from a home improvement store will sit flush with the wall beside the refrigerator. Those changes will be completed this year, opening up the kitchen and increasing its efficiency 100%.