The door that sticks only in summer

A door that binds in July and swings freely in January rarely needs planing at all.

Timber takes up moisture from the air and swells across the grain. A door that is tight only in damp weather is doing exactly what timber does, and planing it to fit in August produces a door with a visible gap for the rest of the year.

Find the binding point before touching anything. A strip of paper slid round the gap while the door is almost closed stops where the door touches. Doing that at three or four heights maps the contact precisely, and it is often a single short stretch rather than the whole edge.

Check the hinges first, because a dropped door imitates a swollen one. Screws pull loose in soft frames over years, the door drops at the latch side, and it starts catching the frame at the top corner. Tightening or replacing with longer screws that reach solid timber behind the frame cures it without removing any material.

Look at the hinge recesses too. A hinge sitting proud in its recess holds the door away from the frame on that side and pushes it into the frame on the other, which produces binding a long way from the hinge itself. Deepening a recess by a millimetre is reversible in a way that planing is not.

If material genuinely has to come off, take it from the hinge edge rather than the latch edge wherever the hinges will allow it. A reworked hinge edge is hidden when the door is closed; a reworked latch edge shows as a tapering gap and can leave the latch short of its keep.

Plane with the door wedged upright and work from the middle outwards towards each end, lifting at the ends of the stroke. Running the plane straight off the end of a stile splits the corner, and the split appears on the face where it cannot be hidden.

Seal whatever is exposed, immediately. A freshly planed edge is bare timber facing the wettest part of a house's air, and leaving it bare guarantees that the same door will need the same treatment next year.