Weatherstripping installation

Weatherstripping installation is the fix for the draft you can feel from the couch on the other side of the room. Cold air spilling across the floor from the back door. The curtain by the entry moving on a still night. Our Repairs division handles this as a standard visit, three exterior doors stripped and swept, and it sits under our door repair work because a door that leaks is usually a door that has moved.

Today is the back half of September, which makes this a live decision rather than a theoretical one. Adhesive backed stripping bonds properly in moderate weather and stops bonding reliably once the surfaces are cold. Caulk and sealant have the same problem. There is a window between now and the first hard freeze where this work goes in correctly, and after that it goes in badly or it waits until spring.

What a weatherstripping visit covers

Three exterior doors, stripped on the head and both jambs, with a sweep fitted at the bottom of each. Three is the usual count in a Southeast Michigan house because most have a front door, a back or side door, and a service door into the garage. We can do more, and we often add the garage door to a house that is heated out there.

Door sweeps and the gap at the threshold

If you can see daylight under a closed door, that is your loudest leak and the simplest one to close. Sweeps come as a screw-on aluminum and vinyl bar, a slide-on U-channel, or an automatic sweep that drops when the door shuts and lifts when it opens. The last kind is the answer for a door over carpet or over an uneven stone threshold, and it is the one homeowners rarely know exists.

Jamb stripping on the hinge and strike sides

The head and side jambs get a compression or bulb seal set against the stop so the door closes onto it rather than scraping past it. The hinge side almost always needs more material than the strike side, because that is the edge that opens up when a door sags. We set it so the door still latches with one hand. Stripping that makes a door need a shoulder is stripping that will be torn off by January.

Where the draft is actually coming from

There is a quick diagnostic you can run tonight. Stand inside on a windy evening and move a hand slowly around the perimeter of the door. A draft along the bottom is the sweep, or the absence of one. A draft down the hinge side, strongest near the top corner, means the door has dropped and the gap has gone wedge shaped. A draft on the strike side usually means the door is not pulling tight against the stop.

Those three tell you three different repairs. The first is material. The second is hinges and sometimes the jamb itself, which is the door having dropped rather than the seal having failed, and no amount of foam tape fixes it. The third is often free. Wrapping the whole door in stripping without knowing which one you have is why so many homeowners do this twice.

There is a second test that takes a minute. Close a dollar bill in the door and pull. If it slides out with no resistance, the seal is not compressing at that spot. Do it at the top corner, the middle and the bottom of each side, and you will have mapped your own door before we arrive. It is the same check we run, and it saves the walkthrough time.

Compression stripping, V-strip and the bulb seal

Three families of material cover nearly every exterior door, and they are not interchangeable.

• Compression stripping: foam or rubber the door presses flat against the stop. Best sealing, needs a door that closes squarely, wears out first.
• V-strip or tension seal: a folded strip that springs against the edge of the door. Nearly invisible, survives years, tolerates a door that is slightly out of alignment.
• Bulb or kerf-in seal: a hollow tube in a carrier that slots into a groove milled in the jamb. What most newer prehung units already use, and replaceable without touching the frame.

On a modern prehung door in a Canton or Plymouth colonial the answer is usually a replacement kerf-in bulb, pulled out by hand and pushed back in. On an old door hung directly in a plaster wall with an applied stop, V-strip on the jamb faces plus a felt or silicone bead on the stop does more than compression foam, because the door is not flat and foam only seals where it is squeezed.

The strike side adjustment that costs nothing

Here is the part of this page that talks us out of work. A large share of strike side drafts are fixed with a screwdriver and no new material at all. The latch is engaging the strike plate, but the door is stopping a sixteenth of an inch shy of the stop, so there is a thin continuous slot the full height of the door. Moving the strike plate toward the interior by that much pulls the door tight.

On a door with an adjustable strike, it is a set screw. On a plain plate, it means plugging the old screw holes with glue and toothpicks or a dowel, redrilling, and sometimes filing the plate opening. Ten minutes. If that is all your door needs, we will do it and tell you the stripping is unnecessary, which is less profitable and more useful to you.

Thresholds with an insert you can turn

Most exterior doors installed in the last few decades sit on an aluminum threshold with a wood or composite insert running down the middle, and that insert is height adjustable. Look for a row of small screws along its length. Turning them raises the insert into the door bottom, which closes the gap without any new parts.

Almost nobody knows those screws do anything. They seize with grit and corrosion, so they need to be backed out and cleaned before they will turn, and raising the insert too far makes the door bind and drag in summer when everything swells. We set it to the season we are in and tell you which way to turn it come spring. That is the kind of thing that also gets checked during an annual check of the house.

Storm doors and what they do not solve

A storm door helps, but it is a wind break, not an air seal. It cuts the wind washing across the entry door and buys a pocket of still air in between. It does not make an unsealed primary door acceptable, and a storm door with its own sagging sweep and a closer that no longer latches is doing almost nothing at all.

Storm doors also have a failure mode worth naming. If the primary door is dark and faces south or west, a tight storm door can trap enough heat in that cavity to blister paint and warp a wood slab. If we see that, we will tell you. Repainting a blistered entry sits with our painting crews only on the inside face, and the exterior side belongs to the rest of the exterior list.

Old doors that were never square to begin with

The bungalows and four squares around Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor have doors hung in openings that settled decades ago. The jamb is out of plumb, the floor has sloped toward the street, and the original door was planed to fit by somebody in nineteen forty who was solving the same problem you have. A square door in a trapezoid opening cannot be sealed with tape.

What works there is measuring the gap at the top, middle and bottom of each side, then choosing material that spans the widest point without binding at the tightest. Sometimes that means a thicker seal on one half of a jamb than the other, which looks odd and works. Sometimes it means resetting the hinges or adding a shim behind one leaf, which starts to overlap with casing and trim work rather than stripping.

If the interior casing has to come off to reach the shim space, we will find lath and plaster behind it and probably some horsehair. We put it back with new casing and caulk where the old material will not survive removal. The same visit is a good time to close the gap where the baseboard and shoe molding meet a sloped floor at the same wall.

The window beside the door may be the real leak

This needs saying plainly. Weatherstripping a door does nothing about the window three feet away, and in a lot of houses the window is the larger leak by a wide margin. Old double hungs with dried glazing putty, failed sash cord pockets, missing parting bead and an unlocked sash that never pulls tight will move far more air than a door gap will.

We will point at it when we see it. Stripping and re-seating sashes is window repair, a different task on the same visit. If the frames are rotted at the sill and the glass seals have failed, the honest answer is replacement windows and not another season of patching. Sealing the envelope also helps keep water out of the house, which matters more in the high water table areas of Washtenaw and Wayne counties.

When a door is past sealing

Some doors are finished. A steel slab with rust perforating the bottom edge, a fiberglass door with a delaminated skin, a wood slab that has cupped so badly the top corner stands a half inch proud, or a jamb rotted through at the bottom hinge. Stripping any of those is money spent on a problem that will still be there in February.

In that case we will recommend a new exterior door unit with factory installed seals and a proper sill pan, and we will tell you so before we quote the small job rather than after. That is a design-build scope with its own drawings and pricing, described in how we scope a job.

The door between an attached garage and the living space deserves its own note. That one is usually a rated assembly with a self-closing hinge, and it is there for fire separation as much as for comfort. We seal it with material that does not defeat the closer and we do not cut, plane or drill that slab to make a sweep fit. If it needs more than stripping, it gets replaced as a unit.

How a weatherstripping visit runs

We book next business day, Monday through Friday, eight to four. No same day calls, no emergency service. A crew checks each door for square, measures the gaps, adjusts the strike and the threshold first, and only then chooses and fits material. Three doors is generally a half day. The work is done by our own W2 employees and carries a written one-year workmanship warranty.

One boundary matters here. Tightening a house changes how air moves through it, and if you have an atmospherically vented gas water heater or furnace in a small closet, combustion air and venting are a licensed plumbing and mechanical question, not a carpentry one. We do not touch gas fired equipment or make that call.

Anything at the electrical panel or a new circuit goes to a licensed electrician. On a home built before nineteen seventy-eight, federal rules require a certified firm to follow specific work practices where painted surfaces are disturbed, and we will tell you which tasks that covers.

Doors are usually one item on a longer cold weather list. If yours includes attic hatches, rim joists, outlet gaskets and the gap around the hose bib, our draft sealing package covers the house rather than just the doors, and winterizing the whole house adds shutoffs, hoses and gutters. Both are sold as grouped visits, which is cheaper than booking each item alone.

Weatherstripping across Southeast Michigan

From Platt Road in Ypsilanti we work on a lot of doors that have been planed, painted and re-hung more than once. In Ann Arbor the historic districts mean keeping an original door and sealing around it rather than replacing it, which changes the material choice entirely.

Exposed rural lots around Dexter, Chelsea and Howell take wind with nothing to break it, so a door that seals in town will still whistle out there. Newer subdivisions in Plymouth mostly need a kerf bulb replaced, not a rebuild. Down in Monroe we see more service doors into unheated garages. We cover Washtenaw, Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston and Monroe counties, including houses watched over while you are away, homes being readied before guests arrive for the holidays, and anyone facing a first winter in a new house.

Get it sealed before the cold settles in

The adhesives and sealants that make this work last are reliable now and unreliable in six weeks. If you felt that draft last February and told yourself you would deal with it, this is the month. View our Portfolio to see how our crews work, then contact us now for a free quote and tell us how many doors you want done. Call the Ypsilanti office at (734) 540-0347, weekdays eight to four.