Doors that stick in the rains: hinges before the planer, planer before the prayer

The door that swings shut in December and shoulders its frame open by the third rain of June is not failing - it is working exactly as wood does, swelling across the grain as the air loads it with water, the reveal you barely measured closing to nothing. Every sticky-door fix on the internet starts with a plane for the same reason most of them end badly: the wood is rarely the real misfit, the hanging is. The order below costs nothing to try and everything to skip; do it in sequence and the saw stays in the shed.

Read the door before you touch it

• Where it rubs tells you why: mark the edge with a pencil swipe and swing - a bind along the top corner on the handle side means the door has dropped on its hinges; a uniform bind on the whole latch edge means swelling across the width; a bind at the bottom that clears when someone lifts the handle is a door hung too low, again a hinge story, not a wood story.
• The lift test: slide a wedge or a coin under the bottom and lift while it swings - the sticky door that closes like a dream while lifted is hanging in air, and its fix is screws before sawdust.
• The season test: same door, dry week. If it swings free, the house is breathing with the weather, and a cut made now becomes a rattle in January - the harmattan shrinkage this desk's wood guide covers from the other side.

The two-screw fix, which is the whole trade secret

Most sag starts at the top hinge, where the whole door's weight levers the two screws nearest the door out of their jamb holes, and the frame's fixing screws then bite only the soft jamb timber or - in many Nigerian doors - into a hollow block through an oversized hole. The classic repair is honest mechanics: replace the two long screws of the top hinge - the ones pointing into the jamb - with screws long enough to pass through the jamb and grip the frame behind it, pulling the whole top of the door back onto its hinge line. A metal frame with a block behind it needs the anchor's answer - strip, fresh plugs or a chemically set fixing - and that is a drill-and-decide afternoon, not a woodwork job.

The hardware that is not the wood

Only the latch sticks and the rest swings free? The door has not grown; the frame has moved or the plate has crept. A strike plate carries the door's closing blow for years - tighten its screws (they pull loose and then the latch drops into air), shift it a millimetre or two with a chisel's honest nudge, deepen the pocket a shave with the same chisel, and the latch catches like the door was regreased, because for the price of a screwdriver it was.

When it truly is the wood - cut it like a joiner

1. Take the door off; a planed edge in place plans the floor too. Find the bind by pencil lines already on it, mark the high face's full length.
2. Remove less than you want - a millimetre, a pass, re-hang, re-test in the same wet weather that complained; swelling is across the width, so a little off the binding edge can return the full reveal.
3. Seal every face and both long edges. The edge is the door's straw: an unprimed, unpainted edge wicks rain-season water straight back into the wood and the door re-swells within a week, mid-passing the finish you just cut away. Prime, then paint, both edges and a foot onto both faces - the six-inch seal is why joiners' doors stay quiet and DIY-cut doors come back fighting.
4. Wax the closing edges - candle, paraffin-free soap, the door's own new friction budget; and for a door welded shut by years of painted edges, run a sharp knife around the seam before any shoulder - forcing a stuck painted door is how paint cracks all the way down the stile, the peeling the bathroom-paint guide then has to argue with.

One material exception, printed so nobody planes a steel door in the rain: metal frames and doors do not swell - their stick, if there is one, is movement, rust or a hinge under strain, and the fix list above stops at the screws. If it is still sticky: the house is moving around the door, and that reading belongs to this desk's crack guides, not this page.

The desk's standing rule

Lift before you plane, screws before sawdust, and seal everything you cut within the same afternoon the rains gave you the problem: a swollen door is the house's weather report, and the correct reply keeps the door on its hinges, the frame in its square, and the planer - like the argument - as the last resort you will not need.