If you have a sliding glass door what kind of blinds??

Yeah, vertical slat blinds are the devil. NOOOOO. 

We have a double curtain rod, with sheers and curtains. We leave the sheers closed pretty much all the time to filter light and close the curtains at night.

on our last house we had vertical blinds on our sliding glass door; I didn't like them, but got used to them.   (Vertical blinds always reminded me of an office building for some reason, but they DON'T hold nearly as much dust as regular mini blinds do, which is important in this climate.  And, the cats can't booger them up or get stuck in them like they could with regular mini blinds.)

In this house, we have french doors that go out to our screened-in patio and we do love them.   During the cooler months / winter, we open both doors and it makes the living room feel almost twice as big. The french doors have mini blinds built into the windows, in between the two panes of glass. No dust!  They operate with a slider mechanism so we can raise/lower and tilt the slats to control the light.  They raise up from the bottom, and we usually leave them up a few inches at night so the cats and dogs can see out, lol.

We currently have verticals that have a texture like fabric. My neighbor has wood shutters. I may eventually replace ours with wood shutters.

As for French Doors, our first house we had those. We replaced them with a nice slider. The French Doors were kind of impractical for us. We couldn’t just leave them open because bugs would fly in. And they leaked if the rain hit them directly.

We have an 8' patio door/slider and have drapes on it.  Based on the houses I see for sale in our neighborhood, that seems to be what most people do.  They stack back to one side when open.  In the evening when they are closed, it looks much nicer than vertical blinds would IMO.  We leave them open all day since privacy is not an issue.   

We are considering replacing our slider with either French doors/fixed panel, or a single door with fixed panels on either side.  I'm interested to hear why others have regretted replacing a slider with French doors.  I agree with paigepea that dealing with custom size doors is a pain!  

I have 2" pleated binds on mine, top down/bottom up. They're only closed on sunny mornings though when the light beats in. The rest of the time they're typically fully open. Wish I hadn't bothered with the top down on these since neighbors aren't an issue at this door's location.

French doors look great, but one of the things I love about sliders is being able to leave it open, with a screen closed. I don't want bugs in the house. 

My parents regretted replacing their slider with French doors for exactly these reasons.

We have sliding panel blinds for our slider. Something similar to these: sliding panels

french doors DO take up more 'space' in the room when you open them- ours open INTO our living room and we did have to arrange the furniture in such a way as to accommodate being able to open the doors all the way to make the most of them.  And even then, the dog bed in the corner of the room stops one of the doors from opening all the way.  But if they had opened out onto the patio instead, they would have hit the patio table. 

So I can see how the space needed for them to function properly might be a concern, depending on how your room is set up-- if we couldn't open ours all the way so that they lay 'flat' against the wall, they'd stick out INTO the room, which would be awful. 


these are gorgeous!  I have seen lots of high-end homes in Phoenix home design magazines that have these along an entire wall of the room-  it makes the indoor/outdoor space all flow together and makes for some gorgeous views of the mountains from inside the rooms.  (I do wonder what those people do about bugs, though- lol.  Although if you're that rich, maybe you just hire someone to kill the bugs when they dare to get inside your house?)

OOOO i like those! We have verticals and I would like to replace but it is off our kitchen and leads to the deck and I am concerned about grease and grime from cooking inside and out. Our grill is about 7 feet away from the door. 

At our last house we had Pella sliding glass doors with the blinds inside the glass. They were wonderful. I can't imagine them ever "breaking". They also offer shades between the glass that have a softer look than the blinds. If we ever need to replace our slider I would chose that option for sure. For now, we just have curtains. We have to close them at night due to neighbors being able to see in. I'd love french doors, but there is no where for the doors to open without being in the way, plus we like to leave the slider door open with the screen closed on nice days.

I've wondered too, honestly!  so far nothing too bad has happened to ours.  The slider 'switch' thing that raises and lowers them must be some sort of magnetic connection, because one of ours kind of 'slipped' and malfunctioned for a bit- I think we might have tried to raise it too quickly- but my DH got it to work correctly again, thank goodness. I work them pretty carefully now, because I don't want them to break.

(to tell the truth, actually, it took us a while to realize they actually functioned like a 'regular' mini blind does!    When we first moved into the house, they were all the way in the 'down' position, and we thought the only thing you could do was just 'slant' the louvers to let light in through the window; we didn't realize the blinds would raise all the way up till we had lived in the house for a few months!    )

Blinds IN BETWEEN the two panes of glass in the door. This was a game-changer for the back door. Every other door covering got destroyed by traffic.