1st time user….. Love reading this in the magazine so I thought I would give it a try on line. I have a customer who has a couple of interior doors that won’t stay open. I seem to remember either reading or hearing about ways to adjust the door at the hinges to make it stay put. Anyone have any advice?
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The door is likely not hung plumb.
A quick fix trick: remove one or more hinge pins. lay it on the concrete. Give it a gentle hit with a hammer. The slightly bent pin will bind enough to keep the door from swinging on it's own.
The right solution: rehang the door.
Either that, or have the house exercised to rid it of the spirits that are messing with the door :-)
Thanks Matt. I suggested rehanging the door and I did't get a warm and fuzzy from him. I will try the hinge pin trick and go from there. Cheers.
I would add ,do it while the homeowner isn't watching.
Ditto what Matt said.
Before you rehang it, take a good level and figure exactly over the full height of the door exactly how out-of-plumb it is. Rehanging might, or might not, be achievable depending on your hinge situation. A good trick if you want to slightly reset the hinges is to put glued-up chopsticks in the old screw holes. Then you've got nice solid wood to reset the screws into.
The door won't stay open because the door jamb is out of plumb. I work on a lot of old houses where, because of settling, this is the case. What you need is to do is have the two hinge pins be exactly plumb. The door can be out of plumb to fit the jamb that's out of plumb. If the hinge pins are plumb the door will stay put.
I did one door where the hinge was mortised into the door and sat on top of the jamb. while the other hinge was into the jamb and sat on the door. One hinge stuck out about a half an inch more than the other. I had to do this because of the way the house had settled. I addition, the door was a trapezoid. Cutting and hanging that door was a fun job.
I am admittadly totally amature when it comes to doors but I seem to remember hearing that you could shim the hinges of the door at the jamb to fix a problem like this. Of course that would be provided that it would still fit nicely in the jamb. I think that was a fix for door sag. Am I way off base?
What the others said <g> and a Howdy, & welcome to BT.
The trickiest thing with doors is getting them like Goldilocks--just right.
So, you may need to shim under a hinge to kick a door in or out. Just don't do like a couple of how-to books & videos suggest, where you just lean on the jamb hinge leaf with a cresent wrench.
Why? Well, twenty years later when the most-recent dufus buys the house, he cusses you until your ears burn 'cause now the doors are wracked in the openings of his old house <sigh, grumble, grumble, grumble--<grin>> . . .
Check how the doors sit in their opening closed now. Make sure you know how they fit their current openings closed before monkeying with them open. Trading one unsat condition for another does not make you look real sharp to the client, if nothing else.