That door that catches, scrapes or needs a shove almost never needs planing. Nine times out of ten it's a loose hinge or a mis-aligned strike plate — a ten-minute fix with a screwdriver.
A sticking door is the house talking to you. Timber swells and shrinks with the seasons, hinge screws work loose over years of use, and the frame itself can shift slightly as the house settles. Any of these throws the door a few millimetres out of true — and a few millimetres is all it takes to catch.
The fix is almost always cheap and reversible. Before you reach for a plane or sandpaper — which permanently removes timber — work through the gentler adjustments first. Start by finding exactly where it's catching.
Before anything else, take a screwdriver to every screw in all the hinges and simply tighten them. Years of opening and closing works hinge screws loose, the door sags, and it starts to catch. This alone fixes a huge share of sticking doors.
Work the top hinge first — it carries the most weight and is the usual culprit when the door catches at the top latch corner.
If a screw just spins and won't bite, the hole is stripped. Tap in a couple of glue-dipped matchsticks or a wooden toothpick, snap them flush, and drive the screw into the fresh timber.
Still catching after tightening? You can shift the door slightly by adjusting how deep a hinge sits. To move the door away from a rubbing edge, add a thin cardboard shim behind that hinge leaf. To move it the other way, deepen the hinge recess a touch.
Catching at the top on the latch side usually means shimming the bottom hinge — it tilts the top of the door back toward the hinge side and lifts it clear.
Cut your shim from a cereal box and tuck it behind the hinge leaf, screw holes and all. One layer of card moves the door more than you'd expect — add a second only if you need it.
If the door swings fine but won't latch, or rattles when shut, the latch tongue is missing the hole in the strike plate. Close the door slowly and watch where the latch lands — usually it's hitting just above or below the opening.
For a small miss, unscrew the strike plate and file the edge of the hole a millimetre or two in the direction you need. For a bigger gap, reposition the whole plate: fill the old screw holes and re-mount it where the latch actually lands.
Smear a little lipstick or marker on the latch tongue and close the door. It leaves a mark on the strike plate showing exactly where the tongue hits — no guesswork about which way to file.
Only if the hinge and strike-plate fixes haven't worked — and the door is genuinely too big for its frame — do you remove timber. Find the exact rub mark (the test earlier shows you where), and sand or plane just that spot back a fraction.
Take off as little as possible. Close the door, check, and repeat. If you've sanded back to bare timber on an exterior or painted door, seal or repaint the spot so moisture doesn't get in and swell it all over again.
Tighten, then shim, then adjust the strike plate, and only sand as a last resort. Each step is more permanent than the one before — exhaust the reversible fixes first and you'll rarely need to touch the timber at all.
// Work top to bottom — stop as soon as it clears.