A sticking door is almost never a door problem. How to tell whether it is the hinge, the jamb, the slab or the house - and which repair actually lasts.
A door that drags, sticks in the frame or refuses to latch is one of the most common calls we get, and it is also the one most often fixed the wrong way. Planing the edge of a slab because it rubs takes five minutes and usually makes things worse six months later. The door is rarely the problem.
Four causes, four completely different repairs
Loose hinges. The most common cause by a wide margin. Standard hinge screws are short and bite only into the jamb, not the framing behind it. After years of use the top hinge pulls out a few millimetres, the door drops at the latch corner and starts catching. The fix is a longer screw driven through the jamb into the stud, which pulls the door back into square. It costs almost nothing and solves a surprising share of sticking doors.
A jamb that has moved. Houses in Los Angeles move. Seasonal moisture, slow foundation settlement and the occasional shake all rack door openings slightly out of square. Here the door is fine and the opening is not, so the repair is shimming and re-hanging, sometimes with the strike plate relocated.
A swollen slab. Real near the coast and in bathrooms, much rarer inland. A solid wood door takes on moisture and grows. Planing is legitimate in this case, but only after the hinges have been ruled out, and the cut edge has to be sealed or the door will keep drinking.
Hardware, not geometry. A door that closes but will not latch is usually a strike plate problem rather than a door problem. Moving the plate a couple of millimetres or filing the opening is a ten minute repair.
How to work out which one you have
Open the door halfway and look at the gap between the slab and the jamb down the latch side. An even gap top to bottom means the opening is square, so look at hardware or swelling. A gap that closes towards the top means the door has dropped, so check the hinges first. A wedge shaped gap with a frame that visibly leans means the opening itself has racked.
Second test, five seconds: lift the door by the handle while it is open. If it moves at all, the hinges are loose.
The doors that need more than an adjustment
Sliding glass doors that need a shoulder to move are almost always running on flattened rollers, and rollers are a replacement part, not an adjustment. Bifold and pocket doors that jump the track need track and guide work. Exterior doors that stick and also show daylight along the bottom need threshold and weatherstrip work, which is worth doing anyway for what it saves on cooling.
When it is worth calling someone
If a door has already been planed once, if the frame is visibly out of square, or if the same door has been adjusted twice and keeps coming back, the problem sits upstream of the door. That is the point to have someone diagnose the opening instead of shaving the slab again. Our door repair and adjustment work starts from $145 and is usually same or next day, because most of these are single-visit jobs.
One more thing worth reading together: if the sticking door came with new cracks above the frame, the movement that racked the opening is the same movement that opened the cracks. Patching them without addressing the cause is why drywall cracks keep coming back.
Related services
- Door Repair and Adjustment
- Door and Window Installation
- Window Repair and Screen Replacement
- General Home Repairs