Why doors stick in Nellore's monsoon — and why not to plane them

A door that has closed sweetly for two years and suddenly drags on the frame in October is almost never a broken door. It is wet timber. From the first heavy north-east monsoon rain until about February, the moisture in the air climbs across the district, and every wooden shutter and frame in the house takes some of that in and grows. Two or three millimetres across a 900 mm shutter is enough to make it bind.

So the first answer is: do not reach for the plane. If you shave the edge in December to make it close, you have removed material the door will need again. By April, with 40°C outside, the timber gives that moisture back and shrinks — and now you have a visible gap, a shutter that rattles in the wind, and a latch that no longer meets the strike plate cleanly. A seasonal problem has been turned into a permanent one.

Work out where it is actually rubbing

Close the door slowly and watch the gap all the way round. The shiny, polished-looking band on the edge or the frame is the rub mark and it tells you the cause.

• Rubbing at the top of the latch side. The top hinge has loosened and the door has dropped. Very common, and a screw job, not a wood job.
• Rubbing along the whole latch edge. Genuine swelling. Seasonal.
• Rubbing at the bottom near the floor. Usually a swollen bottom rail that has been soaking up mopping water for years.
• Latch touches the strike plate but will not go in. The shutter has moved a couple of millimetres; the plate can be shifted or filed rather than the door cut.

What to do before the plane comes out

Tighten the hinge screws first — all of them, top hinge first, with a screwdriver that fits the head properly. If a screw spins without biting, the hole is stripped. Glue a wooden dowel or a few matchsticks into the hole, let it set, and drive the screw again, or move up to a longer screw that reaches fresh timber.

If the door is only just catching, rubbing a candle or a bar of dry soap along the binding edge often carries it through the wet months. Clean the frame rebate too — years of paint build-up in the corner is sometimes the whole problem.

For windows, check the shutter corner joints. When a casement window shutter drops out of square, the joint at the bottom corner has opened, and re-squaring and re-gluing that joint is the fix. On sliding aluminium-framed windows, most jamming is grit in the bottom channel; vacuum it out and wipe it dry before assuming anything is bent.

Seal the edges before the rain, not after

The top and bottom edges of a door are the two surfaces nobody ever paints, and they are exactly where moisture enters end grain. September is the month to lift a sticking door off its hinges, dry the edges, and seal them with primer and paint or polish. Do the same for the bottom rail of window shutters and for the foot of a door frame where it meets the floor — daily mopping keeps that spot wet.

Homes on the coastal side — Muthukur, Krishnapatnam, the eastern edge of the city — get the double hit of salt in the air corroding hinge screws while the timber swells. Check for rust streaks below the hinges; a rusted screw head that shears off turns a small job into a bigger one.

When to call a carpenter

Book a job when the fix is structural rather than seasonal:

• The frame itself has moved or is coming away from the masonry.
• The bottom rail is soft, dark or crumbling — that is rot, not swelling.
• Hinge screw holes are stripped past the matchstick fix.
• A shutter joint has opened at the corner and the door is out of square.
• The lock or latch no longer aligns and the door has to be slammed.

A door or window fix — hinges, lock alignment, planing where it is genuinely due, or frame repair — is ₹499 on our rate card. Any hardware or timber needed is charged at MRP and shown to you before it goes in.

One last thing worth saying plainly: never force a swollen door with your shoulder. It splits the stile at the lock, and a split stile is a much longer repair than the sticking ever was.