Sticking Doors and Sloping Floors

Doors that stick, rub or will not latch

Doors are hung square in a square frame. When the foundation under one side drops or lifts, the frame racks out of square and the door starts to rub. The clues to look for:

• A gap at the top of the door that is wider on one side, like a wedge.
• The latch no longer lines up with the strike plate.
• Drywall cracks running diagonally up from the top corners of the door frame.
• Several doors on the same side of the house acting up at the same time.

Humidity or foundation?

Wood doors swell in humid weather, and that can make one door stick all over. Foundation movement tends to make the door rub at one corner, and it usually affects more than one door in the same area. If the doors on one end of the house all started sticking after a long dry summer, the slab under that end is a likely cause.

Many homeowners around New Braunfels notice doors acting differently in August than in March. That seasonal swing is the clay soil under the slab shrinking and swelling.

Sloping floors

A slope you can feel walking across a room usually means a noticeable difference in height. Simple checks: set a marble or a small ball on a hard floor and see whether it rolls the same way in several spots. Lay a 4 foot level in different directions. Watch for gaps opening under baseboards or between cabinets and the wall.

On a slab, the low area is often near an outside corner or along one wall. On a pier and beam house, the floor may dip between supports or near a bathroom where moisture has damaged the wood.

Other signs that usually travel together

• Windows that are hard to open or no longer lock.
• Cracks where the wall meets the ceiling.
• Tile floors cracking in a straight line across a room.
• Kitchen counters or cabinets pulling away from the wall.
• Stair-step cracks in the brick outside the same room.

What an inspection adds

Your marble test tells you something is off. An elevation survey tells you how much and where. The contractor takes floor readings on a grid across the whole house and sketches the high and low points. That map decides whether you need repair, how many piers, and where they go.