Our 27 year old sliding glass door that leads out to our back porch is getting too difficult to slide open. We use it every day, our access to the garage is through that door. We're both getting older and don't plan to leave our home for a long time if we can help it, so our thought is to replace the slider with a french door that swings open. However, we have a beautiful view out the back through the slider and would like to keep as much glass as possible. Also, the room with the slider is on the north side of the house, so it would get a lot darker in that room if we had much less glass.

So far we've we haven't found anyone who makes a 4' wide swinging French door (we'd prefer 2 4' panels, one would be stationary - that's the current configuration with the slider). Other options are to make the opening about a foot smaller to accomadate 2 3' panels (they quoted a 85 5/8"x 82 1/2" french door), but we'd rather not change the size of the opening. The other option is to put a french door in the middle with 2 stationary panels on either side, but the way that the room is configured, that wouldn't work either. Currently the door opens on the far left of the opening, and we'd have to keep that configuration. We'd also like to keep the wider opening if possible because that has come in handy when moving things in and out.

Any thoughts? I'm at a point where I think we just might have to put another slider in, but even the new ones in the showrooms were hard to open.

Thanks in advance for any help with this.