Door and window repair in Apex, NC

Doors that stick, drag or will not latch

The complaint is almost always the same and the cause is almost never the door. A door that has started to rub at the top of the latch side is telling you that the hinges have loosened or the frame has moved slightly. Planing the door down is the last resort, not the first, because it is irreversible and it usually treats a symptom.

The order of work is: check that the hinge screws are tight and long enough to reach the framing behind the jamb, since the short screws that come in the box only bite into the jamb itself and pull out over time. Then shim behind a hinge leaf to swing the door slightly in the direction it needs. Then move the strike plate, which is a two-minute fix for a door that closes but does not latch. Only after those does taking material off the door make sense.

Exterior doors bring extra factors. A slab that has swollen from a wet season, hinges bearing the weight of a heavy insulated door, and a threshold that has sunk all show up as the same drag at the bottom corner. Most exterior thresholds are adjustable with a screwdriver, which fixes both dragging and the strip of daylight underneath.

Drafts and the strip of light under the door

If you can see light around a closed exterior door, you are paying to heat and cool the outdoors. The compression weatherstrip in the jamb hardens and stops sealing after a decade, and the sweep on the bottom of the door wears where it drags on the sill. Both are inexpensive, both are quick, and replacing them is one of the better returns on a small repair.

Sliding patio doors leak air at the interlock and along the bottom track, and they are also a security weak point — a supplementary foot bolt or track lock costs very little and matters more than most people assume.

Hardware, locks and keying

Replacing a knobset or deadbolt is straightforward when the new hardware matches the existing bore and backset. It gets interesting when a door has a non-standard bore, when the strike has been chiselled out over the years and no longer holds a plate, or when someone wants every lock in the house keyed alike. Rekeying to a single key across a house is possible with most residential cylinders and is worth doing straight after a purchase.

For an exterior door, the item worth spending on is not the lock body but the strike. A deadbolt is only as strong as the three-inch screws behind its strike plate reaching into the framing — with the short screws that ship in the box, the frame gives long before the bolt does.

Older windows in Durham and downtown Apex

Wood double-hung sash windows in pre-war houses work on an entirely different principle to modern vinyl units, and they are repairable in a way modern ones are not. A sash that will not stay up has a broken cord or a failed spring balance, and re-roping a weight-and-pulley window restores it to working order rather than replacing it. Sashes that are painted shut can be cut free. Loose glazing putty can be raked out and renewed. Restoring an original sash and adding a good storm window frequently gets close to replacement-window performance while keeping the window that suits the house — which matters where local historic district guidelines apply.

Newer windows have their own failure list: cranks and operators on casements, balances on vinyl double-hungs, and torn screens. Screens are re-meshed rather than replaced in most cases.

Rot at a sill or jamb discovered during any of this is covered under siding and wood rot repair. Door and trim repainting is covered under interior painting, and this work makes up a large share of a typical home inspection punch list.