When you hear the phrase “sliding door blinds” you probably think of vertical blinds for sliding doors. These are certainly the most standard kind of sliding door blinds. We’ve all seen them — they consist of metal or sturdy plastic strips about four or six inches wide. Each strip hangs from a track that’s mounted above the sliding glass doors. These are what I would consider to be a very basic window treatment to cover sliding doors at night or when you prefer a modicum of privacy. They’re perfectly adequate in a starter home, but you may find them to be a little bit noisier than you’d prefer, especially the metal kind, which can have the slats clicking against each other every time someone brushes past them. Another disadvantage to this type of sliding door blinds is that they can get easily bent or dented since they’re not made of very sturdy materials to begin with. Of course, if a slat gets damaged you have the option of replacing just that slat, but what are you going to do if the shade of white available at the store isn’t the same shade as the blinds you bought six years ago? Believe it or not, there are a lot of different shades of white and a single slat that doesn’t match will really stand out and ruin your look.
Another kind of sliding door blinds uses wide panels instead of narrow slats. These are called panel sliding door blinds, or sometimes, sliding door panels. The panels are usually made of high-end materials such as finished and polished wood. Each panel might be eighteen to twenty-four inches wide, which means you’ll have very few panels in a set of blinds. Far fewer than the number of slats needed for vertical blinds. These wider panels mean less wear and tear on the pulley mechanism being used to open and close the blinds. They also mean that panel sliding door blinds tend to be a lot quieter — how can they rattle much, when there just aren’t that many moving pieces? And of course the look of panels of wood is ever so much more elegant than vertical slat sliding door blinds can ever be. The cost of panel blinds is commensurate with these advantages, but since you only replace window treatments once a decade or perhaps even less often, it’s not a very significant expense when averaged out over the length of time that your panel sliding door blinds will be in use. Another advantage of panels is that they don’t have to be made of finished wood. They can also be of unfinished wood that is covered in any sort of fabric you desire. This will let you match your sliding door blinds to your couches if you like and create a truly unified look.