· by Michael Blair, Nashville's Handyman Service
Sticking doors are one of the most common things on a handyman list here, and one of the most commonly fixed the wrong way. The usual response is to plane the edge until it closes, and in a humid July that works, right up until the heat comes on in November and the same door has a gap you can see light through. A door sticks for one of three reasons: the hinges have let it drop, the wood has taken on moisture, or the opening has moved. The fix depends on which, and the door usually shows you.
Read where it rubs
Close the door slowly and watch where it catches, or look for the shiny, worn paint on the edge and the frame. A rub at the top corner on the latch side, with a wider gap at the top of the hinge side, is the door sagging on its hinges. A rub along most of the latch edge is swelling or thick layers of paint. A rub at the bottom is often a new rug, new flooring or a threshold, not the door at all.
Also look at the frame. If the gap along the top of the door is visibly wedge-shaped when the door is closed, and there are fresh diagonal cracks running from the corners of the door frame up the drywall, the opening itself has gone out of square.
- Top corner on the latch side: sagging hinges
- Whole latch edge, worse in summer: moisture or paint buildup
- Bottom edge only: flooring, rug or threshold
- Wedge-shaped gap with cracks at the frame corners: the house moving
The hinge fix comes first
The most common cause is the simplest. The screws in the top hinge work loose over years of use, especially the short ones that only reach the jamb, and the door tips toward the latch. Tighten them first. If they spin, replace one or two of the screws in the top hinge, on the jamb side, with a screw long enough to pass through the jamb and bite into the framing behind it. That pulls the whole door back up and toward the hinge side, and it fixes a remarkable number of doors in a few minutes.
If the hinge mortise is chewed out, the hole can be filled with glued wooden plugs or a hardwood sliver and redrilled. A thin shim behind the bottom hinge leaf, or deepening the top mortise slightly, also changes the angle the door hangs at without touching the door itself.
Humidity and the season
Doors take up moisture from the air, and a Middle Tennessee summer puts a lot of it there. Solid wood and MDF doors swell most through their edges, especially where the top and bottom were never painted when the door was hung. That is why a door sticks from June to September and swings freely once the air turns dry with the heating season.
If a door only sticks in summer, the fix is to seal it, not shave it. Take it off the hinges and paint or prime the top and bottom edges so moisture has less way in. If it really does need trimming, mark the rub in the humid months and plane it when the wood is in between, taking off as little as possible, and prime the cut edge the same day. Planing to fit the most swollen week of the year leaves a door that rattles for the rest of it.
When the frame has moved
A house on expansive clay moves a little with the seasons, and a crawl-space house with a pier that has settled can move more than a little. Doors near the middle of the house, over the main beam, usually show it first. One door out of square with cracks at its corners, and others near it starting to catch, is a pattern worth noting.
Adjusting the door or the strike plate will get it closing again, and that is fine for now. But a door that needs adjusting every year, or doors on one side of the house getting worse together, is a reason to have the foundation looked at by someone who does structural work. We will tell you when a sticking door is the first sign of that rather than just keep trimming it.