A door that sticks in an eighty-year-old house is usually square, and it is the frame around it that has gone out of true.
Upfront flat pricing on every job. You approve before we start.
from $120
from $90
from $70
from $90Jobs from across this page, photographed on the day. Our own work, not stock.
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Almost everything on this page is priced by the count of openings rather than by the difficulty of any one of them. Each door and each window gets its own measuring, cutting and fitting, and in a pre-war house no two windows match, so a seal is sized opening by opening instead of cut off one long roll.
Walk through the house once and list every door that sticks, squeaks or will not latch. The lot goes in a single trip, and the second opening always costs less than the first because the tools are already out.
One flat price per job, agreed before we start. Each range opens the guide behind it.
Wind season packs grit into screen mesh and slider tracks, and the first sign is a patio door that grinds instead of glides. We vacuum the track, clean the rollers and rescreen the frames that tore. Near the water the mesh and spline go brittle sooner, and aluminum frames pit from salt long before the glass shows anything. If you are rescreening a beach house, we would rather do all the panels in one visit than come back in March.
We install deadbolts, strike plates and smart locks, and we set the strike with screws long enough to reach the framing so a kick lands on the stud instead of the trim. Most builders skip that. A lock does nothing for a split jamb or a door that swings open on its own because the house leans. Weatherstripping, $90–$200, kills the draft under a bungalow front door and takes some street noise with it.
Lock & Deadbolt Installation in Los Angeles →find the gap in a drafty door →
We free painted-shut wood sash with a knife and patience, and that one is worth paying for. Rot is a different answer. Once a screwdriver sinks into the sill, filler is cosmetic and the sash needs real millwork from a shop, and whole-window replacement is not our trade either. On the sash that are still sound we scrape the runs, wax the channels and reset the stops so the window stays where you leave it.
Push on the frame and look at where the door meets it. If the gap is even and the door just drags, that is an adjustment. If the gap runs wide at the top and tight at the bottom, the opening has racked and the fix is at the jamb, not the slab. If a screwdriver sinks into the sill or the bottom rail, the wood is gone and no amount of hardware brings it back. We tell you which one you have before quoting.
Wood swells when the air is wet, and a few weeks of rain is enough to take up the clearance a door had all summer. That is why planing a door in February is a mistake: come August the gap is loose and the draft is back. We adjust the hinges and the strike first and only take material off when the door binds year-round.
Usually, and it comes up often. Once wood is off it does not go back, so we work on the other side of the problem: shim or move the hinges, deepen the mortise, move the strike, and where the gap is now too wide, add a stop or weatherstrip that closes it. If the slab has been cut so far that the lock no longer catches framing, replacing it is the honest answer.
We do, and there are a lot of them across the basin. Rollers, tracks, latches and screens on those are all serviceable, and a slider that grinds is usually flat rollers plus grit rather than a dead door. What we do not do is swap the glass or replace the whole unit. Single-pane glass in an aluminum frame is glazier work.
