doorsuk
I am buying a new build property in Salisbury, UK and the cloakroom door swing overlaps the kitchen door swing, so if someone is coming out of the cloakroom at the same time as someone coming out of the kitchen they will bang against each other and could cause damage and injury.
Surely this is against building regs?
Before you get started carefully evaluate if you really really want to have a pair of doors that swing out 18" into the room. In many bedrooms this is likely to be a less than desirable thing to have. If you are having a hard time visualizing what this would be like then you should get some large cardboard boxes and make up a fake set of the doors and duct tape them in place for a few days. Then with normal usage of the room you can swing the fake doors open and shut to see if the 18" interference is a pain or not.
Do not try to install the door hardware right on the top of the drywall. You will indeed regret doing that sooner as opposed to later.
The really correct way to do this is to remove the banding drywall material. (This will likely be more work than first guess because there is highly likely to be metal corner pieces installed on each corner of the opening). You would also remove the banding drywall at the upper side of the opening along with any previous door track hardware. Then you would fit in new boards to make a proper jamb for the doors. These will want to 3/4" thickness and not the 0.5" thickness that you proposed. Proper door fitting will demand that there be a small gap between the jamb and the exposed stud faces. The gap is used to allow the adjustment of the jamb opening so that it is perfectly square and plumb. Tapered wood wedges in the opening help to wedge the frame one way or another.
After the jamb is in place the trim is installed across the gap to bridge over the space from the jamb out over the drywall.
You should also plan for installing door stop molding which gives an edge for the doors to close against.
Door Comparison
I've added a couple of pictures to my answer to show the advantage of bi-fold doors in terms of how they project out into the room less than full swing doors. First off you would want to use a pair of bi-fold doors per opening for optimum usage. The second point is that the pivot point for bi-fold doors can often be recesed into the opening which lessens the projection distance into the room. The latter comment would also apply to a single bi-fold door application as well.
I can appreciate the fact that bi-fold doors use up some of the opening width. For your most often used closets you may want to consider the possibility to widen the opening which of course is not a trivial project. But then what is the price of convenience.
Also closets with deep blind ends are indeed a pain to make use of. Often it can be advantageous to re-fit the closet pole in such closets so that they go across from the front to back of the space at the ends so it is easier to take hung garments in and out.
Depends on how big of a gap that you have that is currently being shimmed but yes this would be the easiest thing to do. I would make sure that you have at least 3/16" gap at all points before doing this.
Note: Just to be clear you should be using the new jams in this door. At the very least you need to use the hinge side but preferably both. After you take out old jams (top can stay if it is going to cause a ton of work - and most of the time it doesn't) you install put the new ones in.
Best Answer
I don’t know about the UK, but in the U.S. door swings are not regulated until you reach 10 occupants in commercial, institutional, retail, etc. buildings. (Residential and agricultural buildings are never regulated...well, there is a requirement about the size of an exit/entrance door from a residence.)
So, your doors might be inconvenient, cause bodily injury, be difficult to use in an emergency, seem silly, etc. they would not violate any building code in the U.S.
Our codes are based on the International Code Council (ICC).