Why Your Door Sticks in Winter and How to Fix It Permanently

A door that catches on the frame is one of those irritations you live with for years and then fix in fifteen minutes.

The instinct is to plane the edge. Resist it. Planing is permanent, and if the actual cause was a hinge, you will have a door with a gap you cannot close when the weather changes.

Diagnose before you cut

Close the door slowly and watch where it touches. The contact point tells you the cause.

Catching at the top of the latch side — the top hinge is pulling loose. The door is sagging away from it. This is by far the most common cause.

Catching at the bottom of the latch side — the bottom hinge is loose, or the frame has shifted.

Catching along the whole latch edge — genuine swelling, or the frame has moved. Only this case might need planing.

Catching at the top edge against the head of the frame — usually structural movement above the door, worth investigating rather than trimming.

Fix one: tighten the hinges

1. Open the door fully and support the outer edge on a wedge or a stack of magazines, taking the weight off the hinges.
2. Try each hinge screw with a screwdriver, not a drill. Most will tighten a quarter turn and stop. If one spins endlessly, the screw hole is stripped.
3. Repair a stripped hole. Remove the screw, push wooden matchsticks or a glued dowel into the hole, snap them flush, and drive the screw back in. It bites into fresh wood.
4. Better still, use one long screw. Replace one screw per hinge in the frame side with a 65mm screw that reaches past the frame lining into the structural timber behind. This pulls the whole frame tight and fixes sag permanently.
5. Close and test. In most cases the rubbing is gone at this point.

Fix two: adjust the strike plate

If the door closes but will not latch, or needs a shove, the problem is alignment between the latch and the strike plate.

Look at the plate — there will be a shiny scratch mark showing where the latch is hitting. Unscrew the plate, and either file the opening a millimetre in the direction needed, or move the plate by filling the old screw holes with dowel and re-drilling.

Fix three: actually planing it

Only when the hinges are sound and the door genuinely touches along the edge.

1. Mark the contact area with pencil while the door is hung.
2. Take the door off — knock the hinge pins out, or unscrew the hinges from the frame side.
3. Lay it on trestles, edge upward.
4. Plane in the direction of the grain, taking very fine shavings. Check constantly against a straight edge.
5. Remove no more than one millimetre before rehanging and testing. It is very easy to take too much and impossible to put back.
6. Seal the planed edge with primer or the same finish as the door. Bare timber absorbs moisture and swells again next winter, which is what caused the problem in the first place.

Why it happens in winter

Contrary to intuition, the swelling is usually humidity rather than temperature. Heating a house drives moisture out of the air, but rain-soaked external doors and unheated hallways can be considerably damper than the rooms either side.

Sealing all six faces of a door — including the top and bottom edges, which almost nobody paints — makes a measurable difference to seasonal movement. If you have the door off for planing anyway, it is a two-minute job worth doing.