A bloke at Unanderra rang about a back door that would not shut without a shoulder in it. He had already been at it himself, twice, with a power plane off the latch edge. It still stuck. By the time I got there he had taken the better part of 8mm off a door that never needed any of it, and he was ready to go again.
I asked him to open it and let it hang halfway. The gap between the door and the jamb ran tight at the top and wide at the bottom on the latch side. That is not a fat door. That is a door that has dropped, and every millimetre he had planed off was going to show as daylight the moment the hinges got sorted.
So before anyone goes near a door with a plane, here is the order I work in.
Read the gap before you touch anything
Open the door about a third and look at the margin all the way round. You want roughly an even 3mm down both sides and across the top. Nobody gets it perfect and it does not need to be.
What you are reading is the shape of the gap, not the size of it.
Even all round, and the door still binds? The door has swollen, or something on the floor has changed. Tight at the top of the latch side and open at the bottom? The door has dropped and it is a hinge problem. Tight down the whole latch side with even top and bottom? The jamb has moved, and that is a different conversation.
Most people never look, because a sticking door feels like a door that is too big. It usually is not.
The dropped door, which is most of them
A door hangs off its top hinge. That hinge carries the weight and the other two mostly stop it flapping about. Open the door, get your fingers on the top hinge and lift the latch edge. If there is any play, any clunk at all, there is your answer.
Nine times out of ten the screws in the top hinge have let go. Standard hinge screws are short, maybe 25 or 30mm, and they only ever grab the jamb lining. That lining is thin, and after twenty years of a door being swung, slammed and hung off by kids, the screw holes chew out and the hinge starts to tip.
The fix takes about ten minutes and costs nothing much. Pull the screws out of the top hinge, one at a time so the door stays put, and replace them with 65mm screws that go through the lining and bite into the stud behind it. Same head, same countersink, they just go somewhere solid. The door lifts back up on its own as you drive them.
If the holes are properly ruined, glue and hammer in a couple of hardwood plugs, let them go off, then re-drill. Matchsticks and PVA is the old trick and it does work on a light internal door, though on anything solid I would rather plug it properly.
That one fix sorts more sticking doors than everything else on this page put together. It is also why doors show up on nearly every rental turnover list we get sent by an agent: a door that has been swung by four sets of tenants has invariably let go at the top hinge, and it reads on a condition report as damage when it is ten minutes of screws.
The stuff that is not the door at all
New carpet is the classic. Somebody lays carpet with a decent underlay, the floor comes up 15mm, and now the door drags in an arc across the front of the room. The door did nothing wrong. It wants the bottom trimmed, and unlike the other cuts on this page that one is genuinely the answer.
Floating floors over the old lino do the same thing. So do the little rubber door stops that get screwed to the skirting in the wrong spot, which people forget about entirely and then blame the hinges.
And down here, there is the weather. Timber takes up moisture out of humid air and swells across the width of the door, which is exactly the direction you do not want. A door that binds in February and swings sweetly in July has not moved at all. It is breathing. Plane it in summer and you have bought yourself a gap you can see from the lounge for the other eight months.
The reason it keeps happening is almost always the same: the top and bottom edges of the door were never painted. Everyone paints the two faces and the edge they can see. The end grain top and bottom gets ignored, and that is where the water goes in. Seal those and most seasonal swelling settles down over a year or so.
Planing, if it really has come to that
Sometimes it has. Old jambs go out of square as a house settles, and there are doors where the margin is genuinely wrong and no amount of hinge work fixes it.
Take the door off. Planing it in the frame is how you end up with a wave in the edge and a scalloped bit where the plane tipped. Mark the line with a pencil against the jamb, take it off in passes, and take less than you think, because you can go again and you cannot put it back.
Latch side is faster. Hinge side is tidier, because you can chop the hinges back into fresh timber and keep the margin even instead of ending up with 3mm one side and 7mm the other. On a painted door I usually go the hinge side for that reason, even though it is more work.
The one rule that is not negotiable: do not take anything off the bottom rail of a hollow-core door. There is a block of solid timber in there maybe 30 to 40mm deep and then nothing but cardboard honeycomb. Cut past it and the bottom of the door is an open void that will never hold a fixing again. I have seen people glue a strip back in. It never looks right and it never lasts.
Then seal the fresh edge before you hang it. Bare timber on a planed edge is an open invitation, and skipping it is how the door swells again by the next humid stretch.
When I tell people to just buy a new door
Not often, but it happens.
Hollow core that has already been cut too far, or has started to delaminate around the bottom where it has been wet. External doors where the bottom rail has gone soft and a screwdriver sinks into it. Doors that have been painted so many times the rebates have filled and the thing binds on its own paint. And the ones where somebody has attacked it with a plane already and the margin is now so far gone that saving it costs more in labour than the door is worth.
A replacement door still has to be hung, and hanging is the part people underestimate. Off-the-shelf doors come oversize and need trimming to the opening, the hinges need chopping in, and the latch and strike have to line up or you are back where you started. It sits in with the rest of the small repair work we do, alongside everything else on the handyman jobs list.
There is no special licence sitting behind any of this. NSW treats hanging and adjusting doors as carpentry work, defined as cutting and placing timber for on-site construction work to put up framing or fix components, "such as stairs, windows, doors, floors and wallboards". Supplying and installing a finished door unit is joinery work, which covers "the making and installing of non-structural timber, timber composite or metal components or elements for buildings", doors included. Both are trade work under the same $5,000 test that the licensing post goes through, and neither is in the group that always needs a licence. A door is not going anywhere near that figure.
The one where I put the tools away
Sometimes the door is the symptom.
If the jamb itself is out of square, if the cornice above the door has cracked on the diagonal, if a second door in the same wall has started doing the same thing, or if there is a crack stepping through the brickwork outside on that corner, the house is moving. Planing the door in that situation makes it shut for a season and tells you nothing about why.
That is a structural question and it is not our end of the trade. We will say so and stop rather than sell you a door adjustment that papers over it.
The Unanderra door came good on three long screws and about twenty minutes. The margin was another matter. With 8mm gone off the latch edge there was a gap you could post mail through once the door sat back up where it belonged, so he ended up buying the door he had been trying to avoid buying.
He took it well enough. What he said on the way out was that he had assumed a sticking door was a door that was too big, because what else would it be. Which is exactly the assumption, and it is the reason the plane comes out first instead of last.
Door questions
Why does my door stick in summer but not winter?
Moisture, not hinges. Timber takes up water out of humid air and swells across its width, and near the coast the summer swing is enough to close a 3mm gap. A door that binds in February and swings free in July has not moved on its hinges at all, and planing it in summer leaves you with a visible gap for the rest of the year. Seal the edges instead, particularly the top and bottom, which are almost never painted.
Should I plane the hinge side or the latch side of a door?
Neither, until you have checked the hinges. If planing genuinely is the answer, the latch side is quicker and the hinge side is tidier, because on the hinge side you can re-seat the hinges into the fresh timber and keep the margin even. Never take material off the bottom rail of a hollow-core door. There is only a shallow block of solid timber in there and once you cut past it the door is finished.
Can a handyman rehang a door in NSW?
Yes. Hanging, adjusting and replacing doors is carpentry and joinery work in NSW, and neither of those is in the group of trades that always needs a licence. Both sit under the general value test, so a contractor licence is required once the job is worth more than $5,000 in labour and materials including GST. A single door is nowhere near that.
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