Sticky Sliding Closet Doors

First check the alignment of your closet doors.

Sticky sliding closet doors.

Sliding closet doors fall off tracks. The wood can swell in the hot and humid summer air the hinges can become loose with usage and your house can even shift and settle over time causing changes in the frame. Sliding glass doors in a home are attractive but require the occasional tune up for optimal performance. Tom s rule of thumb for keeping a door from sticking in the jamb is that the reveal the space between the door and jamb should be 1 8 to 3 16 inch wide or about the thickness of a nickel.

Fixing a sticky or stuck sliding glass door is a simple process that even an inexperienced homeowner can handle but one that may take a little time and muscle to complete. Then lift the door up and out of the track laying it down carefully across two sawhorses. In some instances you have a door that sticks along the strike area the metal part of the door frame where it meets the outermost edge of the door. First slide open the door completely and remove the head stop.

Use an aerosol lubricant to lubricate all the door rollers. In this article we ll go over how you can fix a sliding door that sticks so you can enjoy your patio. Stand back five feet or so and examine the gaps on the top and bottom. Sliding doors are very heavy very breakable and very expensive this is a two person job.

Try these tips and tricks to fix a door that just is not budging as easily as it should. A sticking sliding door may seem like a minor inconvenience but it gets to be a real big pain sooner rather than later. Doors can start sticking for various reasons and it s always a hassle. Yes it s that sticking door of yours.

To clean and lubricate the hardware of a sliding closet door use a stiff brush a toothbrush or a hand vacuum to clean dust from the tracks. Because sliding doors don t fold out the way bifold doors do they allow access to only half the width of the opening at a time. The key to fixing a sticking door is to determine what is causing the issue and then you can decide if you can fix the problem with a simple trick. There should be an even and uniform separation all the way along the top and bottom.

Move the door back and forth like you did in step 1 to help the door glide over the oiled areas. Finally add the 3 in 1 oil along the track. Examining one sticky bedroom door in his house tom spends a little time getting a sense of its predicament. In other cases it may be the wood door edge itself scuffing on the door frame.

If you see an uneven gap it will require you to raise or lower one of the sides. Each time you open it there is a little grab before it releases. This will actually help to move around the lubricant into the harder to reach middle area where the door is constantly sliding and experiencing the friction that makes it stick.