Patio Door Replacement | Sliding & French | Aspen Bravo

Best for: Sliding or French doors to a deck, porch, or yard

The largest single glass opening in most homes, and the largest moving part. A patio door is simultaneously a wall of glass, a door, and a weather seal spanning six to twelve feet — which makes it the opening where installation quality has the most room to go wrong.

Sliding vs. French

Sliding panels ride in a track and take no floor or deck space to operate. That’s the argument: if there’s a table, a grill, or furniture near the door on either side, a slider is the only option that works. It also gives you the most glass per dollar.

French doors swing, hinged at the outside edges, and give you the full opening width when both panels are open — which a slider never does, since one panel always overlaps the other. They read more formal and are the better fit on traditional architecture.

The practical test: measure the clear space on both sides of the opening, inside and out. If a swinging panel would hit anything, you want a slider.

What’s different about installing a patio door

Everything gets harder as the opening gets bigger, and a patio door is the biggest opening in the wall.

Level across a long span. A twelve-foot sill that’s a quarter inch out of level across its run puts a slider’s rollers under uneven load for the life of the door. It shows up as a door that gets progressively harder to slide, and it is not fixable by adjusting the rollers.

The threshold carries real water risk. This opening usually sits at grade or just above a deck, which means it takes direct rain, splash-back, and in winter, snowmelt. The sill pan and threshold flashing under a patio door do more work than anywhere else in the house.

Structural headers. A wide opening carries significant load above it. Replacing an existing patio door in the same opening is usually straightforward, but any change in width is a structural question that needs answering before an order is placed.

Weight. Patio door panels are heavy — a large insulated glass panel in a reinforced frame. Setting one is a multi-person job with the right equipment, and rushing it is how frames get racked during installation.

What we install

ProVia sliding patio doors in 2-lite and 3-lite configurations, plus French patio doors — in ecoLite™, Aspect™, Endure™ and Aeris™. Internal grids, blinds-between-glass options, and a full color range including the textured matte finishes shown here.

Warranty note: patio doors carry the same Lifetime Limited Transferable coverage as ProVia windows, though handle finish coverage varies by finish — details here.