Sticking in summer, daylight under the sweep, a deadbolt you have to lift the door to throw — here is how to tell a repair from a replacement.
Exterior doors fail slowly enough that most people stop noticing. You start lifting the handle to throw the deadbolt, you nudge it with your hip in August, and after a couple of years that becomes just how the door works. It is worth checking whether the door is telling you something.
1. You can see daylight around the edges
Close the door on a bright day and look at the perimeter from inside with the lights off. Any visible line of daylight is a direct path for conditioned air, water and insects. Sometimes that is a weatherstrip replacement. If the gap is wider at the top than the bottom, the jamb has racked and the fix is structural rather than cosmetic.
2. It sticks in humid weather
East Tennessee summers swell wood doors, and a small amount of seasonal movement is normal. What is not normal is a door that stays tight into October. Persistent sticking usually means the hinge side has sagged, the jamb was never shimmed properly, or the slab has absorbed moisture through an unsealed edge.
3. The deadbolt does not line up
If you have to lift or pull the door to throw the bolt, the frame has moved. Enlarging the strike plate hole is the common shortcut and it makes the door less secure, because the bolt is no longer seating fully into solid framing.
4. There is soft wood at the bottom of the jamb
Press a screwdriver into the bottom six inches of the jamb on both sides. If it sinks, water has been getting behind the trim — usually from a failed threshold seal or a missing drip cap. That rot spreads into the framing behind it, so this one gets worse and more expensive the longer it waits.
5. Your entry is noticeably cold or hot
Stand next to the closed door on a very cold morning. A door that is doing its job should not feel dramatically different from the wall beside it. Most of the time this is a seal problem rather than the door itself, which is good news — but it still needs correcting.
6. It rattles when the wind picks up
A rattling door is not latching against compression. The seal is not being squeezed when the door closes, so it is not sealing at all. Adjusting the strike can fix a mild case, but a door that rattles hard is usually hung in a frame that is out of square.
Repair or replace?
The honest test is the jamb. If the frame is solid, square and rot-free, a slab replacement or a proper re-hang solves most of the list above for far less money. If the jamb has soft wood, has racked out of square, or the threshold has failed, replacing the whole pre-hung unit is the repair that actually lasts.
If you are not sure which side of that line your door falls on, we will come look at it and tell you plainly. There is no version of this where we sell you a full unit for a door that needs an afternoon of adjustment.