Carpentry advice for Crawley homes
Why doors stick, and how to cure them
A door that sticks is a small thing that wears you down. You push, it resists, you shove, it bangs open. Then you do it all again on the way out.
There are only a handful of reasons a door sticks. Work out which one you have and the cure is usually simple.
First, find where it rubs
Close the door slowly and watch the gap between the door and the frame. It should be about the thickness of a pound coin all the way round. Where the gap vanishes, that is your tight spot.
Look for shiny or scuffed patches on the door edge and the frame. Slide a sheet of paper round the closed door. Where the paper jams, the door is touching.
Now note where the tight spot is. Top corner on the handle side? Along the whole handle edge? At the bottom? Each points to a different cause.
Cause 1: the timber has swollen
Wood soaks up moisture from the air and gets bigger. This is why a door can be fine all summer and tight from November. Bathrooms and kitchens are the worst, along with outside doors after weeks of rain.
Doors swell most where bare wood is exposed. The top and bottom edges are often left unpainted because nobody sees them.
The cure. Plane a little off the tight edge, then seal every bare edge with primer and paint or varnish. If the room is always steamy, a better extractor fan helps the door as well as the walls.
Cause 2: loose or worn hinges
If the door rubs at the top corner on the handle side, and there is a wide gap at the top on the hinge side, the door has dropped. Open it part way and lift the handle. If you feel movement at the top hinge, you have found it.
The cure. Tighten the screws. If they just spin, the holes are worn. A carpenter fills them with glued timber plugs or fits longer screws that reach solid wood. Badly worn hinges are replaced.
Cause 3: too many coats of paint
Each time a door and frame are painted, the gap between them shrinks by the thickness of the paint on both faces. After several coats there is no gap left. You can tell by the thick, rounded paint edge and the way the door sticks along its whole length.
The cure. The edge is planed or sanded back to wood and given one thin coat.
Cause 4: a new floor
Thicker carpet, new underlay or a laminate floor all raise the floor level. A door that cleared the old floor now drags.
The cure. The door comes off and the bottom is trimmed. If you are planning a new floor, have the doors cut as part of that job.
Cause 5: the frame has come loose
A door frame is fixed to the wall at a few points each side. If those fixings fail, the frame bows or shifts, and the door no longer fits the hole. Slamming speeds this up.
The cure. The frame is re-fixed and packed straight. This is a carpenter's job, as the architrave usually has to come off to reach the fixings.
Cause 6: the house has moved
Every house settles a little over the years, and door openings go slightly out of square. A door that has been trimmed to suit and then sticks again some years later is usually just more of the same.
Much of Crawley stands on clay. Clay shrinks in a long dry summer and swells again when the rain returns, and a house on it can move a few millimetres with the seasons. A door that sticks in a dry August and frees itself by winter may be showing you this.
When to take it more seriously. If several doors and windows start sticking at once, and you also see new cracks in the walls that are wider at one end, ask a surveyor or structural engineer to look. That is beyond carpentry. A single sticking door with no cracks is rarely anything to worry about.
What not to do
- Do not keep forcing it. Each shove strains the hinges and frame.
- Do not plane the door in a damp spell and leave the edge bare. It will swell again, and in summer you will have a wide gap.
- Do not take wood off the hinge edge of a fire door, or trim a fire door at all without checking its limits.
- Do not ignore a sticking front or back door. If it will not close easily, it may not be locking fully either.
Easing a door is one of the quickest jobs a carpenter does. See door hanging and repairs in Crawley, or read repair or replace a door if you think yours may be past saving.
Had enough of shoving that door?
A sticking door does not free itself for good. Forcing it loosens the hinges and can split the frame, which turns a few minutes with a plane into a bigger repair.
Say which doors stick and where in Crawley you live. Asking is free.