Why Wooden Doors Warp — and How to Stop It
Door warping almost always comes from uneven moisture on the door's two faces, not from bad wood. Here is the real cause and the actual fix.
Sagging Wooden Door Scraping the Floor: Causes and Fixes
A wooden door that drags on the floor or has opened a gap at the top usually suffers from loose hinges and screws, not bad wood. Find the cause and see which fixes you can do yourself.
A sagging wooden door shows two signs: the bottom corner on the handle side drags on the floor, and the top of the door on that same side has pulled away from the frame. The latch no longer catches easily either. The good news is that in most cases the wood is fine and the problem lies in how the door hangs on its frame.
Sagging is not the same as warping
With warping, the door leaf itself bends or bows, usually because of uneven moisture; we explain that in our article on warped wooden doors. With sagging, the leaf is straight but the whole door has rotated slightly and dropped. To tell the difference, close the door and look at the gap around it: if the gap is wedge-shaped (open at the top on the handle side, tight at the bottom), it is sagging. If a straightedge laid on the door face shows a gap, the door is warped.
Four common causes of a sagging wooden door
- Loose or stripped hinge screws: the most common cause. Years of opening and closing widen the screw holes in the frame timber.
- Screws that are too short: a screw that only bites into the wooden frame and never reaches the wall or subframe slowly gives way under the door's weight.
- Weak or too few hinges: a heavy solid-wood door is not meant to hang on two light hinges; a third hinge spreads the load.
- Frame or wall movement: building settlement, or a frame that was never installed plumb, pulls the door to one side.
Fixing a sagging wooden door, from simple to specialist
Step one: tighten the screws. Open the door slightly and tighten the screws on the top hinge, which carries the most load. If a screw just spins and never tightens, the hole is stripped.
Step two: repair the stripped hole. Remove the screw, tap a wooden dowel or a few slivers of wood with wood glue into the hole, let the glue dry completely, trim the excess and drive the screw back in. In Germany and Turkey this is what carpenters try before anything else. Alternatively, replace one of the top-hinge screws with a longer screw that passes through the frame and anchors in the subframe.
Step three: specialist work. If the door is still out of line after these two steps, the hinge may need moving or adding, the hinge recess may need recutting, or the frame is out of plumb. Planing the bottom of the door only hides the symptom, and the problem returns within months; an unsealed planed edge also becomes an entry point for moisture.
Planing the bottom of a door is not a cure; it only hides the symptom.
If your door was installed recently and has already dropped, the problem is the installation and the installer should come back. If it has worked for years, a longer screw and a wooden dowel are usually enough.
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