Doors, Locks & Carpentry in Pittsboro, NC

Not all doors are house doors

Pittsboro is the most rural area we cover, and a good share of the door work here is on buildings that are nothing like a house: barns, workshops, detached garages, pump houses, and the gates that go with a property on acreage.

Those come with their own rules.

Openings are not standard

Older outbuildings were framed on site to whatever suited the person building them, out of whatever timber was to hand. Openings are frequently:

• Not a stock width or height
• Not square, sometimes by a noticeable margin
• Not plumb, because the structure has moved over decades
• Framed in something other than modern dimensional lumber

Which means the door gets fitted to the opening rather than the opening being made to suit a stock door. Either a door is built to fit, or a stock door is trimmed and the frame packed and shimmed to make a working, sealing opening out of one that is out of true.

That is more work than hanging a door in a house and it is the normal situation out here.

What the surrounding structure is

The fixings depend entirely on it. Post-frame construction, masonry, stud framing and old heavy timber all take different approaches, and a fixing suited to one is useless in another.

Worth telling us when you get in touch, or sending a photo of the opening including the surrounding wall.

Hardware has to be rated for outdoors

This one costs almost nothing to get right and a lot to get wrong.

Interior-grade hinges, hasps, latches and bolts corrode quickly in an unheated building. Once a hinge pin has seized, the door stops swinging freely and starts taking the load instead — so the door damages itself.

Galvanised or stainless hardware costs slightly more and lasts many times longer. On a door that will be opened every day for twenty years, that is not a close decision.

Gates

A separate item and one of the more common calls out here.

A gate that drags is almost always a post problem. A wide gate hangs entirely off one post, and the leverage on that post is very large — the weight of the gate multiplied by its length. Any movement in the post shows up as several times as much movement at the far end of the gate.

Check the post by pushing it. If it moves at ground level with little effort, it has rotted at grade, which is where timber posts fail. Solid above, solid below, gone in the few inches in between where it is permanently damp with plenty of air.

Adjustment buys time and does not fix it. Packing the hinges or shortening the gate deals with the symptom while the post carries on failing.

The fix is the post, set properly. Concrete poured as a flat-topped collar holds water against the timber and can rot it faster than no concrete at all, so where concrete is used it needs shaping to shed water with drainage below — or a metal standoff so the timber never touches soil.

Bracing. A gate that has sagged in itself, rather than at the post, needs a diagonal brace running from the bottom hinge corner up to the top latch corner. That is the direction that works. Fitted the other way round, the brace hangs rather than supports and does nothing.

Security on a remote property

Worth a paragraph because the considerations differ from a suburban street.

Outbuilding doors are frequently the weak point on properties where the house itself is well secured. Hasps fixed with short screws into softwood, or into a door that has softened at the bottom, come off easily.

Fix into something solid. Long fixings reaching structural timber, and a hasp arrangement where the fixings are not accessible when the door is closed.

On the house, the same rule that applies everywhere: a deadbolt strike fixed with short screws that stop in the jamb relies on a thin strip of trim. Screws long enough to reach the framing behind turn it into a fixing anchored to the structure. Ten minutes, and the most useful security change available.

House doors out here

Older Chatham County houses have been added to over decades, so doors between sections may be non-standard, openings may not be square, and what is behind a jamb varies.

Seasonal binding. Doors swell in summer humidity and shrink in winter. Planing in August gives you a gap in January, so clearance gets recovered by fixing hinges and adjusting strikes.

Paint build-up on older doors is dimensional — a dozen coats on the edge and a dozen on the jamb is a real thickness, and cleaning out the hinge mortices frequently fixes a door nobody could otherwise explain.

Original doors are worth keeping. Solid panel doors from an older farmhouse are better made than most of what is available now, and mortise locks were designed to be serviced rather than replaced.

Trim and small carpentry

Trim milled on site in an old house has no modern equivalent, so damaged sections get built up from available parts or run to match.

Small carpentry: alcove and closet shelving, boxing in a pipe run, a window seat or mudroom bench, a stair spindle, a small access hatch, trim around a new opening. Not structural framing, not anything requiring a permit.

Access and bundling

Gates, gravel drives and buildings well back are normal. Mention them so the right vehicle and the right amount of time get planned.

Pittsboro is about thirty minutes from us with an hour round trip, so this is very much a place to send a list rather than a single item.

Getting a price

Photograph the door or gate, the opening including the surrounding structure, and the hinge side. For a gate, push the post first and tell us whether it moves at ground level.