How To Fix A Sagging Door That Won't Close - Janitor Method

Don't take one shaving off that door. Not with a plane, not with a sander, not with the rasp in your drawer. Wood doesn't go back on, and whatever you cut off this month is a gap you'll feel under that door in January. Here is what most people never find out. That door probably isn't sagging. The frame around it was never fastened to the building, and the piece that fastens it came in the box with the door. That isn't my theory. Pull up Therma-Tru's own installation sheet, the paper that ships inside the carton. It tells the installer to drill an eighth inch pilot hole in the top hinge and drive a number ten by two and a half inch screw, supplied in the box, through the hinge and into the stud. It even prints the reason: to anchor the door frame and prevent sagging. Masonite bags the same long screws to its frames and says they are extra long to secure the jamb to the adjacent rough opening stud. So it is a printed step in hanging the door. A tired crew skips it on a Friday afternoon, and nothing falls down that day. Meanwhile the screws the factory does put in are three quarters of an inch long. Hager's residential catalog lists them, Emtek sells the same thing as a replacement, and the jamb they go into is about eleven sixteenths of an inch thick. That screw cannot reach past the jamb. Your whole door has been hanging on a piece of trim since the day it went up. Five things in this film, in order, cheapest first. The first one is free and tells you which problem you actually have. The third is the toothpick trick you already know, and I tell you where it works and where it wastes your afternoon. The fourth costs two dollars. And about the sander. A wood door does not grow taller, so if yours drags on the floor, something else moved. Across a year it changes width by an eighth to three sixteenths of an inch, and Jeld-Wen writes into its own warranty that a quarter inch or less of that is normal and not a defect. Masonite and Simpson both cap what you are allowed to trim at an eighth of an inch per edge. One summer's swelling is bigger than everything that door is ever allowed to give you. I was never a carpenter. I was the head custodian at one public school for forty years, and the janitor to everybody in town, with four hundred and eleven doors and nobody to help me with them. #HomeMaintenance #DoorRepair #Fixing