Doors, Locks & Carpentry in Apex, NC

The summer door

Apex grew through the 1990s and 2000s, and a large share of the town is now old enough for its doors to have developed habits. The most common call we get is a door that binds in summer and behaves in winter.

That is not damage. It is timber doing what timber does.

Wood is hygroscopic — it takes moisture out of humid air and swells, and gives it back in dry air and shrinks. A Carolina summer is humid enough to make a measurable difference across the width of a door and its frame. Three or four millimetres of total movement is entirely normal, and three or four millimetres is more than the clearance most doors are hung with.

Which is why planing is usually the wrong answer. Take material off in August to cure the binding and by January the door has shrunk back, and now it is undersized. You get a visible gap, a draught on an exterior door, and a door that no longer sits properly against its stop.

We get called out to correct that regularly, and correcting it means adding material back, which is a considerably worse job than the original problem.

What is usually actually wrong

Before anything gets removed, four things get checked. In most cases one of them is the answer.

1. The top hinge

The single most common cause of a sticking door anywhere.

The top hinge carries most of the weight of the door. Over years of use its screws work in their holes, and once they lose grip the top of the door swings slightly away from the jamb. The whole door tips, and the top corner on the latch side drops into the frame and catches.

The fix is refixing that hinge properly — which normally means longer screws that pass through the jamb into the framing behind it, rather than short ones biting into soft jamb material that has already failed once. That lifts the door back to square and the binding disappears.

No material removed, ten minutes, and it holds.

2. The strike plate

If the latch no longer catches, or catches only when you push, the door has moved relative to the strike.

Sometimes fixing the door position fixes this too. Where it does not, the strike gets adjusted or repositioned. Filing the hole bigger is the shortcut, and it makes the door rattle in the frame and lose its seal — it is a last resort rather than a first move.

3. The stop

Where a door has been painted repeatedly, the stop can build up enough to hold the door proud of where it should sit.

4. Paint build-up

On the edges and in the hinge mortices. Enough coats and a door that fitted perfectly no longer does, and the answer is dealing with the paint rather than the wood.

When easing is right

There are cases where a door genuinely has to lose material: a frame that has moved permanently, a door that has warped, or a replacement that was never sized properly.

When that is the case, the honest way to do it is to take the door off, ease it in the dry season rather than the wet one, take the minimum, and seal the cut edge — an unsealed edge takes up moisture faster than the rest of the door and makes the problem worse.

The rest of what this covers

Locks and deadbolts. Replacing, rekeying so several doors run on one key, and fitting smart locks. Worth knowing: a deadbolt is only as good as what its strike is fixed into. Builder installations frequently use short screws that stop in the jamb rather than reaching the framing behind it, which means the whole assembly can be forced by splitting the jamb. Longer screws into the framing is a ten-minute change and it is the single most useful security upgrade on a house.

Trim and baseboards. Damaged sections, gaps that have opened at mitres, skirting that has come away from the wall, and casing damage. In Apex houses of this age the profiles are still generally available, which makes matching straightforward — that is not true everywhere on our list.

Small carpentry. Shelving in an alcove, a repair to a stair spindle, a window seat, boxing in a pipe run. If you are not sure whether something falls in this category, send a photo and we will tell you.

Interior doors in houses of this age

Most are hollow-core, and they fail in predictable ways: the hinge side splitting where the screws have pulled, the lock block area failing where a handle has been forced, and the bottom edge damaged where they have been dragged over carpet.

Some of that is repairable and some is not. A hollow-core door with a broken lock block generally is not worth rebuilding, and we will tell you when replacement is the honest answer rather than filling something that will fail again.

Being local

Apex is where we are based, so there is no travel time in the price. A single sticking door, one lock or one length of skirting is a sensible booking here in a way it would not be at the far end of our area.

Getting a price

Photograph the door closed, and take a close-up of the gap along the top and down the latch side. That gap tells us whether the door has dropped, which answers most of the diagnosis before we arrive. Tell us whether it does it all year or only in summer.