Door dropping or binding: does it need planing or rehanging?

Read the gap before you touch anything

Close the door slowly and watch where it makes contact. The pattern is a diagnosis.

• Catching at the top of the closing edge, with a widening gap at the bottom hinge: the door has dropped. Hinge problem.
• Rubbing along the whole closing edge evenly: the frame has moved or the door has swollen. Check the season.
• Dragging on the floor only: often a new floor covering, not a door fault at all.
• Springing open, or needing a shove to latch: hinges may be over-recessed, or the latch and keep no longer line up.
• Uneven gaps top and bottom on the hinge side: the frame itself is out of square.

The checks worth doing yourself

Open the door halfway and lift the handle edge gently. If it rises noticeably, the hinge screws are loose or the hinge recesses are worn. Then look at the screws themselves. Short screws into soft lining timber pull out under the weight of a solid door, and the whole leaf sags towards the latch.

Also check whether the problem is seasonal. A door that binds every damp winter and behaves every summer has a moisture story, not a hinge story.

When rehanging is the right answer

Rehanging, or simply resetting the hinges properly, is right whenever the door itself is sound and square. Longer screws into solid timber, packing behind a hinge leaf, deepening or shimming a recess, or adding a third hinge to a heavy door will lift a dropped leaf back into line without removing a shaving from it.

This keeps the gaps even, keeps fire door performance intact where that applies, and does not leave a tapering edge that will look wrong once painted.

When planing genuinely is the answer

Planing is right when the door has permanently swollen, when it has been painted so many times that the build up is fouling the frame, or when it is going into an old frame that will never be square. Even then it is measured, marked, taken off its hinges and worked on a bench, then resealed on the cut edge so it does not take up moisture again.

Planing a door in place, unsealed, is why so many doors bind again the following winter.

When the door is not the problem at all

Frames move as houses settle, particularly in older Kent properties and in extensions during their first year. If the frame is out of square, the fix is at the lining, not the leaf. We will tell you that rather than reshape a perfectly good door to fit a bad opening.

Questions we're asked about this