How to: fix a sagging door. See how easy it is.

Sometimes the things we have to do around the house are more practical than pretty. Such as when a door won't fully close because it is sagging.



Meet our door to the office: As you can see it was severely sagging to the point where it didn't close easily. If you wanted to close the door, you had to lift it up with the handle to make it fit in the door frame. Not ideal.



Here was the problem: the screws that attach the hinge to the door frame were loose because the holes had become too big for them over time. The previous owners had tried remedying that by using bigger screws at one point, but that was only a temporary fix and soon the door was sagging again after we moved in.



We started out our fix by supporting the door on top of some books. That's our history book down there on top of our math book. Who says books aren't useful in real life? They clearly have never had a sagging door



We removed the screws from the door frame.



Then we got a piece of wood dowel just a smidge larger than the holes left by the screws.



We drilled new holes, the same size as the dowel.



Then we cut some pieces of the wooden dowel (we had first checked that they fit the holes length-wise), added wood glue and inserted them into the holes.



And used a hammer for persuasion.

Then we waited a couple of hours for the glue to dry.



Before re-attaching the new screws, we pre-drilled into the center of each dowel to avoid splitting the dowels.



Then we re-attached the hinge with new screws and removed the books. We only had a problem with the top hinge, but you can of course repeat this step with all three or four hinges of your door if needed.



It's so nice that the door now closes with no effort. It's been a couple of months since we made this repair and the door is still aligned with frame.

About how much do you appreciate that I didn't use "a-door-able" anywhere in this post. That would be so lame, right.




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