Doors and Windows That Stick

Wood takes on moisture from the air and gives it back. A solid-core door in a humid week can swell enough to bind against its jamb and then release on its own a fortnight later. Paint build-up, a loose hinge screw, a settled threshold, and a strike plate that was never quite right all produce the same complaint.

So the first question is not "is my foundation moving" but "how many, and which ones". One interior door that drags in July is close to meaningless. Four doors across one end of the house that all started binding in the same season is a pattern, and patterns are what carry information.

The useful detail is the reveal — the gap between the door slab and the jamb, all the way around. On a door that hangs properly, that gap is even. When a wall is pulled out of square, the gap stops being even, and where it closes tells you which way things moved.

• A gap that pinches at the top of the latch side while opening at the bottom of the hinge side suggests the opening is no longer a rectangle.
• A deadbolt that has started hitting the strike plate high or low — rather than the door simply feeling tight — is a misalignment, not a swell. Wood swelling makes a door tight on all edges; it does not usually move the bolt relative to its hole.
• Windows that have gone stiff on one side of the house while the other side is fine is a location pattern, and location patterns are worth noting down.

None of these prove anything by themselves. They are just the difference between "the door is fatter" and "the hole is a different shape", which is the distinction actually worth making.

North Texas does not deliver its rain evenly. The National Weather Service's Fort Worth office puts the normal annual precipitation at Dallas/Fort Worth at 37.01 inches, against a climate record running back to 1899[1] — but that annual figure is an average across years that in practice swing hard between long dry stretches and heavy wet ones.

That swing is what drives the seasonal version of this symptom. The ground responds to it on a schedule you can almost put a date on: the USDA's description of Houston Black, the clay under much of the eastern metro, records that its surface cracks stay open for 90 to 150 cumulative days in most years[2] before closing again. A house sitting on that is being gently worked back and forth every year.

So doors that bind at the end of a dry summer often free themselves after a wet winter without anyone doing anything. A door that binds and then releases on that schedule is behaving normally for the region. A door that binds and simply stays bound through a full wet season has stopped following the pattern, and that is the more interesting case.

Resist planing the door straight away. Once material comes off, the evidence goes with it — and if the opening later moves back, you are left with a door that no longer fits in the other direction. Mark the binding point with a pencil, note the date, and walk the rest of the house checking every door and window the same way.

Write down which ones bind and where they are. A floor plan with four marks on the same side of the house is a genuinely useful thing to hand somebody; "the doors have been sticking" is not.

If the pattern is clustered rather than scattered, or if doors are binding at the same time as new cracks or a floor that feels off, work through the symptom check — it weighs combinations rather than single symptoms, which is the right way round for this.

A sticking door is one of the weakest single signals there is. It is worth paying attention to what it does across a full year, and worth very little as a one-off observation in a single week.