Fixing a Broken Door

I'm sure you've all experienced a door getting stuck, in my case when the kids slammed the door shut it broke apart the door. A little frustrating for a new door I only purchsed 18 months ago. The wet weather had caused the door to swell up and stick, and then break when it hit the frame.

1. Sash Clamps
2. F Clamps
3. Screws
4. Glue (optional)
5. Tape
6. Boiled linseed oil
7. Drill Bit
8. Drill
9. Impact Driver

The first thing I needed to do was pull the door back together; this needed to be done in two ways.

1. Pull the lock side of the door back into alignment with the hinge side of the door. I used three long sash clamps for this.
2. Pull the door timbers back together. You can do this with a few F-clamps to squeeze the timbers together.

You can and probably should put some glue into the joints before clamping everything back into place. I just didn't have any waterproof glue on hand.

While it sounds silly, most people don't use screws correctly. To get the best performance out of screws, the screws need to be able to move freely in the first piece of timber while gripping and pulling the second piece back to the first. This is why screws often have no thread on the back half of the screw; otherwise you need to drill a hole slightly larger than the screw through the first piece of timber.

A simple way to ensure you only drill through the first piece is to use a piece of tape around your drill bit as a flag to measure the depth you are drilling. Now you can safely drill a hole for each screw.

I then used an impact driver to screw the door back together. I probably went a little overboard, but I needed the door to stay together.

It doesn't look the greatest, but when the summer comes I'll fill over the screws and repaint the door. The important thing at this stage is getting the door functional, I'll make it look nice later.

This is often the case with any home repairs; sometimes you are forced to make a temporary repair and then loop back and fix that repair at a later date. Don't let the idea of a perfect fix prevent you from making a good fix.

You can now safely remove all the clamps from the door and test that it swings and closes correctly. The clamps I used didn't have the nice little rubber feet to prevent damaging the door, so you can see where they marked the door. I'm planning to repaint the door anyway, so this will be fixed at a later date.

The door was still catching (the original cause of the damage), so I planed a small amount of the door off to allow it to close easier. I had to be a bit careful as the door had swollen quite a lot and if I took too much off the lock wouldn't engage in the summertime.

Lastly, I gave the timber of the door a coat of boiled linseed oil to seal it against moisture. I'm pretty sure the moisture got into the door from around the lock, so I'll let that dry out and shrink back to size in the summer and oil and paint everything so it won't stick next winter.