Door repair and installation

A door that sticks every July and rattles every January is rarely a door problem. It is a house problem, and it is the most common door repair call we take across Southeast Michigan. Wood swells. Foundations settle. A hinge that has carried sixty pounds of swinging weight since 1968 eventually sags. We fix the door, and we fix the reason the door quit working.

This page covers the whole beat. Adjusting and rehanging what you already have, installing what you do not, and sealing the gaps that push your furnace harder than it needs to work. Wright’s Repairs runs as its own division, which means a two hour door job gets scheduled as a two hour door job instead of waiting behind somebody’s kitchen.

What a sticking door is telling you

Almost every stuck door traces back to one of three things: the door moved, the frame moved, or the hardware gave up. Telling them apart takes about five minutes with the door open and a close look at the gap around it. That gap, the reveal, should run even from top to bottom. When it pinches at one corner and opens at the other, the door is out of square with its frame.

Seasonal movement in Michigan houses

Humidity here swings hard. August air pushes moisture into solid wood doors and they grow across the grain. February air pulls it back out and they shrink. A door planed down during a humid week will rattle loose by Christmas, which is why we check the reveal in the season you are actually standing in and correct the hinges before we take anything off the slab.

Older homes around Ann Arbor feel this most. A 1920s bungalow has solid wood doors in plaster openings, and plaster does not flex. The same house in a wet spring can have three doors binding at once. Fixing them usually means hinge shims and a strike plate move, not a new door.

Settling, framing and tired hardware

A house settles unevenly over decades. Basements take on moisture, joists deflect, and a door frame that was plumb at framing sits a quarter inch out of square thirty years later. Screws back out of soft jamb wood. Hinge leaves bend. The door still fits the opening, it just no longer hangs the way the opening wants it to.

Most of that is correctable without replacement. Longer screws into the framing behind the jamb pull a sagging hinge back. A shim behind the bottom leaf swings the slab away from a tight corner. We start with door adjustment and alignment because it is faster, cheaper, and it keeps the original door in a house where the original door is part of the point.

Doors that will not latch or close

A latch that misses its hole is the same geometry problem seen from the side. The door has dropped, so the latch bolt now lands below the strike plate opening. You can usually see the witness mark, a small bright scrape on the plate where the bolt has been hitting metal instead of passing through.

The wrong fix is filing the strike plate bigger until the bolt finds air. That works for a season and leaves you with a door that no longer pulls tight against the stop, which means a draft and a door that swings open on its own. The right fix is putting the door back where it belongs, then moving the plate if it still needs moving.

Drafts, weatherstripping and your heating bill

Stand next to your front door on a windy January evening and you will feel whether the seal still works. Most exterior doors in Michigan houses are running on original weatherstripping that went hard and cracked years ago. The foam compresses permanently. The sweep at the bottom wears through where shoes scuff it. Neither part is expensive, and both are the cheapest comfort you can buy in this climate.

Air sealing is also where a repair visit pays for itself quietly. A quarter inch gap along the hinge side of a standard door is roughly the same opening as a fist sized hole in your wall, running all winter. Weatherstripping installation is a short visit and it changes how a room feels the same day.

Here is what we check on a drafty exterior door:

  • The compression seal along both jambs and the head
  • The sweep and threshold contact across the full width
  • Whether the door still pulls flat against the stop when latched
  • The corners, where seals fail first and get noticed last
  • Daylight, checked from inside with the lights off

If the slab itself is split, delaminated or rotted at the bottom rail, sealing it is throwing money at a dead door. That is the point where we talk about door replacement instead, which sits with our exterior work rather than the repair division.

Timing matters more here than on most repairs. Seals and sweeps are far easier to fit while the door is still moving freely in mild weather. Once a frame is cold soaked and the wood has shrunk, the same door reads as looser than it will be in April, and it is easy to over tighten a sweep that then drags all spring. Autumn is the honest window for this work in Michigan.

Interior doors, pockets and bifolds

Interior doors get less weather and more abuse. Kids hang on them. Movers clip the corners. Hollow core slabs punch through and cannot really be patched in a way you would want to look at. Replacing a single interior door is a same visit job when the existing jamb is sound, and a slightly longer one when the whole unit has to come out.

Pocket doors are the ones people give up on. The door disappears into the wall, the roller carriage jumps its track, and suddenly there is no obvious way in without opening drywall. There usually is. Most carriages can be reached and reset through the opening once the trim comes off, which is the difference between a repair and a wall patch.

Bifolds fail at the pivot pin almost every time. The bottom bracket loosens, the pin drops, and the panels rack out of square until they will not fold. We handle both under pocket and bifold door repair, and if the opening deserves better trim afterwards, our custom millwork and trim work picks up there. Straight swaps run through interior door installation.

Storm doors and sliding patio doors

A storm door earns its keep in this state. It buys you a second air gap in winter, a screen in summer, and a layer of protection for an entry door that would otherwise take weather directly. Hanging one well is fussier than it looks, because the frame has to follow an opening that is rarely square and still close against its sweep.

The closer is what fails. A hydraulic cylinder loses pressure, the door starts slamming, and slamming loosens the mounting brackets until the screws tear out of the jamb. Replacing a closer is cheap. Repairing the torn jamb afterwards is not. Book storm door installation before the wind finishes the job.

Sliding patio doors fail differently. The rollers flatten, the panel drags on the track, and people start lifting the handle to help it along, which bends the frame. Track and roller work is the fix, and it is worth doing early. Sliding patio door repair is one of the jobs where waiting genuinely costs more.

Locks, deadbolts and keyless entry

Hardware is the part of a door people touch a dozen times a day, so worn hardware announces itself. A deadbolt that needs the door pulled toward you before it will throw is not a lock problem. It is an alignment problem wearing a lock costume, and swapping the lock will not fix it.

New construction hardware, keyed alike across a house, is a common request after a purchase or a rental turnover. We cover that under lock and deadbolt installation. Keypad and app controlled hardware goes in under smart lock installation, and if you are tying it into a wider system, that connects to our smart home integration and home security work.

One caution on smart locks. They are only as good as the door they sit in. A motorized bolt has less force behind it than your wrist does, so a door that needs a shove to latch will jam a smart lock within weeks. We align first, then install.

Making a doorway work for everyone in the house

Access work is a growing share of what the repair crews do, and most of it is small. Round knobs are hard to turn for arthritic hands, and a lever door handle conversion takes minutes per door. A raised threshold that catches a walker or a wheelchair castor can be replaced with a graded one through threshold ramp installation.

Widening an opening is the bigger version. A standard interior door leaves about twenty eight inches of clear passage, and a wheelchair generally wants thirty two. Getting there means moving framing, which means knowing whether the wall carries load before anything comes out. Doorway widening always starts with that structural check, and we give the price after it, not before.

Larger projects, such as a first floor bedroom and bath for a parent moving in, sit outside the repair division and run through our accessibility modifications work instead.

Attic stairs and the openings people forget

A pull down attic stair is a door laid on its back, and it fails the same ways. The spring tension goes, the hinges rack, and the treads on a sixty year old wooden unit crack where nobody looks. It is the one opening in a house where a failure drops you onto a hallway floor, so it is worth attention.

Newer units seal and insulate far better than what they replace, which matters in a house where the attic hatch sits in conditioned space. Attic pull down stair installation is typically a half day, including trimming the opening back out.

The door work we hand to someone else

Not every opening in a house is ours. Saying so up front saves you a wasted appointment, which is the main reason this section exists at all.

Garage doors run on torsion springs holding enough stored energy to injure someone badly, and servicing them is a licensed speciality with its own tooling. We refer that work rather than take it, and the same goes for garage door repair of any kind, opener included.

Broken glass in a door or sidelight is the other one. Cutting and setting tempered glass to code is glazing work, so window glass repair goes to a partner as well. We will still handle the frame, the hardware and the seal around whatever they put in. The full list of what the division declines is on work we do not take on.

How a repair visit actually runs

You tell us what the door is doing. We ask for a photo of the door and the gap around it, because that one image answers most of the diagnostic questions before anyone drives anywhere. Then you get a scheduled window and a person who shows up inside it.

  • You describe the problem and send a photo of the opening
  • We give you a written scope and a price before work starts
  • A carpenter arrives in the scheduled window with the parts
  • You see the door working before anyone packs up
  • Anything we find that is outside the scope gets quoted, not assumed

Repairs crews carry common hardware, so most visits finish the same day. When a part has to be ordered, such as a discontinued patio door roller, we say so on the first visit rather than after. The same standards apply here as on our larger builds, and you can read how we work if you want the longer version.

Where we work across Southeast Michigan

The repair division covers six counties from the shop in Ypsilanti. Housing stock changes a lot across that footprint, and so do the door problems. Plaster openings and solid wood slabs in the older Washtenaw neighborhoods. Aluminum clad patio doors and builder grade interior units in the newer Canton and Novi subdivisions.

One more opening worth mentioning, because homeowners rarely think of it as a door at all. If the hatch into your attic needs a ladder and a moment of courage, our attic pull down stair installation turns that space back into storage you can actually reach.

Related repairs and packages

Door work rarely travels alone. It pairs with trim carpentry, window repair, exterior repair, drywall patching, interior painting and floor repair, and smart locks fall under smart home installation. It also sits inside several home repair packages, among them draft sealing, winterizing a house, rental turnover, inspection repairs and aging in place modifications.

Get the door fixed

A binding door is a small annoyance until the day it will not shut on a cold night. Most of what is on this page is a single short visit, and all of it is work our carpenters do every week across the region. If you want to see the standard we hold on larger builds first, View our Portfolio.

Ready to get it handled? Contact us now for a free quote, and tell us which door is giving you trouble. If you have several, list them all and we will scope them in one visit rather than several. You can also browse the rest of the repair services we offer if something else in the house needs attention while we are there.