The curse of a bifold door

SHORT VERSION

Avoid bifold doors. At all costs. If you see a bifold door, run. Don't look back.

LONG VERSION

I installed bifold doors in 3 locations:

1. Closet (by the front door): There was not much space for the sliding doors and a regular door would be on the way.
2. Laundry closet: Similarly, not much space for a regular door.
3. Half bathroom: I considered installing a pocket door in the half bathroom, but because I also wanted to hang cabinets on the adjacent wall, this was not possible.

Given the space limitations, bifold doors seemed like a good solution. Little did I expect for the problems to start pounding right away.

First, the simple problem: squeaking. Okay, this is not a door issue, per se. This was an installer problem. For some reason, my contractor's guy couldn't do it right, so I got this (turn on the sound):

Fortunately, this one was easy to fix. The reason for all the noise was due to the hinges installed too closely to the edge (the wood was rubbing against the hinge). I fixed it by reinstalling the hinges:

A more difficult problem: I cannot close the bifold doors flat. The hinges seem to be installed correctly, but the doors would not stay closed at 180 degrees. They keep bouncing back at a few degrees:

It is not the end of the world, but at some point I want to get to the bottom of it and figure out why they do this (will probably take a trip to the DIY forums for advice).

The worst problem with the bifold doors is the bathroom. This is something I should've thought of but it totally skipped my mind:

How do you close (and lock!) a bifold door from the inside?

For some reason, I assumed that by the year 2021, humankind must have solved the bathroom bifold door problem. Well, it hasn't. After googling, yahooing, and binging around, I pretty much figured out that bifold doors are not intended for opening or closing from the inside. That's by design. There are no locks for locking or handles for closing bifold doors from the inside. At least, I could not find anything on the U.S. market. For now, I have not bothered with a handle and will live with this sorry excuse of a lock, but at some point, I will have to redo the whole thing:

Then there is an issue of the bathroom door bumping at the door trims (normally, there would be no trim in the middle of the door frame, but since it's a bathroom, a trim would be needed; otherwise, there'd be a gap), but this can be easily solved by filing edges of both left and right trims (I just need to get to it when I have nothing better to do).

RESOURCES:

• INSTALLING A BIFOLD CLOSET DOOR AND BIFOLD DOOR KNOB PLACEMENT

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