Domestic sliding fire door?

[Richard]

I'm in the process of buying a new house that has two bedrooms in the roof space. Due to the roof incline and the location of the stairs it is not possible to fit a standard size door normal to the run of the roof without taking the top corner off one side of the door (which apparently wouldn't go down well with the builders federation). To over come this problem, in the design plans the rooms have been reduced in size by effectively taking a corner out of the room such that a door can be fitted parallel to the roof line. To keep the rooms rectangular shaped I was hoping that instead of fitting hinged doors I could use sliding doors (albeit with the top corner removed) such that when open would be hidden in the wall cavity. Although this probably seems a bit ridiculous (having the corner of doors removed), from experience in my present house having the corner of the room removed is far more inconvenient as far as positioning of the bed etc is concerned.

To meet fire regulation I believe I must have a fire resistant door on each of these rooms, as there isn't a fire door at the top or bottom of the stairs. So my question is, is it possible to obtain a sliding door system that meets the FD20 fire standard, or better still does anybody have any better ideas on how I could avoid reducing the size of the rooms and still meet the fire regulations.

Cheers.

[Owain]

The BCO may negotiate on the fire doors if you have a domestic sprinkler system installed.

Owain

[Rob Morley]

Can the stairs not be moved or steepened slightly to move the doors in a bit?

[Richard]

I'm afraid that if I move the stairs over the required 250mm to be able to fit a full door there is insufficient headroom at the top of the stairs to meet building regulations (even it were considered to be a loft conversion rather than a new build). And unfortunately the stair angle is already at the maximum 42 degrees allowed. I suppose I should explain, when I say the 'run of the house' I actual men from eve to eve. I'm sure there must be a proper term for this.

[Rob Morley]

I though I uderstood your layout but now I'm not so sure how about a plan?

[Richard]

If you're standing on the top floor looking from one eve wall to the other, you're looking at a plan area of a triangle. Then the top of the stairs is positioned as far to the left to allow a minimum head clearance of 2.0m. Now ideally I'd like to put a door to the right of the stair opening but to achieve this I would have to remove the top right hand corner of the door. I don't need to put a door to the right on the room facing you as you come up the stairs, but you do on the room facing the back of your head because of the stairs opening. Now the solution has been to take the corner out of this second room and put an inward opening door in at ninety degrees to how I originally wanted it. Clear as mud. Originally what I wanted to do was to put a return on the stairs at the top, which would mean I could increase the size of the first bedroom by nearly a metre because I wouldn't have to have the space between the top of the stairs and the bedroom door because they would be at ninety degrees to each other, but again this gives me the same problem with having to have a doorway with the corner removed. Basically there isn't enough room to do what I want, so I was looking for ideas for non-standard type doors that wouldn't look to ridiculous and meet all the regulations.

I'd already looked up a case about installing a sprinkler instead of having fire doors, but it was rejected on the basis of the smoke side. However, since it was mentioned I read a bit more and I think they're a good idea in their own right, so the builders pricing a system up.

Cheers.