Interior door repair, adjustment and replacement in Los Angeles

About half the housing in the City of LA was built before 1960, and the county’s median home dates to the mid-sixties. Houses that old have settled. Foundations shift, framing moves with them, and an opening that was square in 1954 isn’t square now. The door is still a flat rectangle. The hole it sits in has changed shape around it.

That’s why planing a quarter inch off the door edge is usually the wrong first move. It’s permanent, and if the frame keeps moving you’re back where you started with a smaller door. A good pro reads the gap all the way around the door first. The pattern of that gap tells you which corner has dropped and what needs adjusting.

Sticking and rubbing doors

Where the door rubs tells the story. Rubbing at the top of the latch side usually means the top hinge has loosened and the door has sagged. That’s often fixed by driving longer hinge screws that reach past the jamb into the framing behind it, pulling the door back into position. Rubbing along the bottom can be a swollen door, a settled frame, or new flooring that went in higher than the old.

Doors that won’t latch

If you have to lift or lean on a door to close it, the latch and the strike plate have stopped lining up, usually by an eighth of an inch or less. The fix runs from filing the strike opening, to moving the strike plate and filling the old screw holes, to shimming a hinge. Fiddly work, and fast in experienced hands. A worn latch or loose handle can be swapped the same visit.

Sagging closet and bifold doors

Bifolds and sliding closet doors drift out of alignment more than anything else in the house. The track hardware is light and the pivots wear. Usually the fix is adjusting the top pivot bracket, replacing a cracked pivot or roller, and re-hanging the panels so they close flush. If the hardware is original and discontinued, a new set is sometimes cheaper than chasing parts.

Replacing an interior door

There are two versions of this job and the difference drives the price. A slab replacement reuses your existing frame and hinges, with the new door trimmed and mortised to match. It’s cheaper, and it’s right when the frame is sound. A pre-hung door brings its own frame, gets shimmed plumb into the rough opening, and the trim gets replaced. That’s the answer when the frame is out of square or rotted at the base.

Older LA homes add a wrinkle. Original doors and openings often aren’t standard sizes, so a stock slab may not fit without modification. Measure the opening before you write in: height, width, and the thickness of the existing slab. Anything that isn’t a standard 80-inch height, or a slab thinner than the modern 1-3/8, changes the job.

If your house was built before 1978, the paint on the door and jamb may contain lead, so sanding or stripping it isn’t a casual job. Tell us the age of the house when you describe the door. It changes how the surface can be prepped, and it changes the price.

In California, contractor licensing has a narrow exemption for work that’s casual, minor, or inconsequential. It’s section 7048 of the Business and Professions Code, and there’s more to it than the price. The job, labor and materials and everything else added together, has to come to less than $1,000. The work can’t require a building permit. It can’t be one piece of a larger project, or a bigger job split into smaller contracts to stay under the number. And the exemption drops away for anyone who advertises in a way that might suggest to the public they’re a contractor, or who employs someone else to do the work or help with it. Miss any one of those and the job needs a licensed contractor.

Most door repairs and adjustments come in well under $1,000. But price is only one of the conditions, so a small number on the invoice doesn’t by itself tell you the exemption applies. A whole-house door replacement, or a job that turns into framing work, is past $1,000 on price alone, and when it is, a licensed contractor does the work.

Door work is priced by the visit as much as by the door. Most of these fixes take twenty minutes to an hour once someone is standing in front of them with a chisel, a shim and a screw gun, so a single sticking door can cost close to what three of them cost on the same trip. Walk the house before you write. The bedroom door that catches in August, the closet bifold that jumps its track, the bathroom door you have to lean on to shut. Send them together, with the age of the house and which way each door swings, and you get one price for the visit before anything is scheduled.