Q: At a client’s home, one of the interior doors always swings open by itself unless it is latched completely. The door meets the stop evenly. How can I best remedy the problem?
A: Gary Katz, owner of Katz Road Show, editor of ThisIsCarpentry, and a presenter at JLC Live, responds: When a door swings open or closes by itself, most carpenters refer to it as a “ghost” door. The cause for the phenomenon is simple: The door jamb is out of plumb.
The jamb may have been installed in an out-of-plumb wall, but that’s not always the case. In my own home, I installed a door that closed by itself even though the wall was perfectly plumb. I’d made that door in my shop from old Douglas fir 2x6s. The door was beautiful, but the wood had so much twist in it that I had to install the jamb out of plumb so the door would hang flush with the jamb. I fixed that “ghost” door with an old, tried-and-true technique—I bent the hinge pins.
The bent pins cause the leaves of the hinge to bind slightly, which stops the door from swinging on its own. In my experience, you can stop most ghost doors from swinging by bending just one pin. But my door jamb was so out of plumb that I needed to bend both hinge pins—and I had to bend them a lot.
It’s easy to bend a hinge pin. Just set the pin on a hard surface—a concrete basement slab works great. You can put a piece of 1-by under one end of the pin, then smack the pin with a hammer right in the middle to bend it a little.
Put the pin back in the hinge and see if the door stops swinging. If the door still swings, bend the other pin (or pins), too. If the door still swings (like mine did), bend both pins even more!
