Doors That Drop And Hinges That Fail

A door that has started sticking is one of the most common maintenance calls there is, and it is also one of the most commonly mis-repaired.

The instinct is to plane the edge where it catches. That works for a fortnight, and then the door is smaller, the gap is uneven, and the actual cause is still there.

Read the gap, not the catch

The gap around a closed door tells you what is wrong.

Tight at the top of the latch side, wide at the bottom, means the door has dropped on its hinges. The top hinge is carrying the load and has either loosened or pulled out of the frame.

Tight at the bottom of the latch side, usually means the bottom hinge is the problem, or the floor has risen, or a new floor covering was laid.

Tight all the way down the latch side, means the frame has moved, or the door has swollen, or both. Moisture and movement rather than hardware.

Even gap but the latch misses the strike, means the strike plate position, not the door at all. Which is the five minute version of the repair.

The door swings open or shut by itself, means the frame is out of plumb. The door is obeying gravity and the hinge pins are not vertical.

Why hinges fail

Screws into the wrong material. A hinge in a hollow or soft jamb with short screws has very little holding it. The fix is longer screws driven into the structural framing behind the jamb, not more screws into the same failed hole.

Stripped screw holes, where the screw has been in and out several times and the timber no longer holds it. Plugging the hole properly and re-drilling gives a fixing with something to grip, and a longer screw into fresh timber does the rest.

Too few hinges for the weight. A solid core door, a fire door or a wide door on two hinges will drop. Three hinges is the normal answer and on a heavy door the hinge itself has to be rated for it.

Worn hinge knuckles, on an old door that has swung tens of thousands of times. The hinge has play in it and no adjustment will take it out. Replacement is the only repair.

Painted hinges, where successive coats have built up in the knuckle and the leaf and the door no longer sits where it was hung.

Fire doors are a different job

A fire door is a certified assembly: the leaf, the frame, the hardware, the seals and the gaps are all part of what makes it work.

Which means it cannot be planed, it cannot be packed with whatever is to hand, and its hardware cannot be substituted. A fire door that catches gets repaired by somebody who can keep its certification intact, and the gap tolerances around it are specified rather than cosmetic. The whole of that is [fire doors in residential buildings](/blog/fire-doors-in-residential-buildings), and it is the one case where the quick fix is also a compliance failure.

Closers and the doors that slam

A closer that slams, stalls halfway or leaves a door open is almost always adjustable rather than faulty, and the adjustment is in two separate speeds plus a latching action.

A closer leaking oil is finished and no adjustment will bring it back. The detail is in [door closers and why they stop working](/blog/door-closers-and-why-they-stop-working).

The repairs, in the order to try them

Tighten and upgrade the hinge fixings. Longer screws into framing, plugged holes where they are stripped. Fixes a large share of dropped doors and takes minutes.

Add the third hinge on a heavy door that has only two.

Move the strike plate where the latch is missing but the gap is right.

Pack or re-position a hinge leaf to bring a door back into square without touching the leaf edge.

Adjust the frame where it has moved, which on a masonry wall means looking at why it moved before fixing the symptom, as in [ceiling and wall cracks, what they mean](/blog/ceiling-and-wall-cracks-what-they-mean).

Plane only as the last step, and only once the hinges and the frame are right, because the planed edge is the one thing that cannot be undone.

Where it overlaps

A dropped door is often a symptom of something else. A door that started catching after a new floor went in is a floor height issue. A whole floor of doors that have gone tight in one season is a moisture issue. Doors sticking on one side of a building only is a movement issue.

Which is why the call gets looked at as a building item rather than a door item. The carpentry, the hardware and the painting afterwards get handled by one team, so a door that was adjusted also gets its edge sealed and the frame touched up rather than left raw.

Our carpentry work. Talk to us about a property.