Doors and Windows Sticking

The door catches at the top corner. You have to lift the back door to latch it. A window that opened fine last year now needs a shoulder behind it.

Two completely different things cause this. One is timber taking on moisture and swelling, which is normal, seasonal and cheap. The other is the house going out of square, which is not.

The good news is you can usually tell which one you’ve got, and the biggest clue is what time of year it happens.

When does it stick? That's the diagnosis

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and almost nobody knows it.

Timber swells when it’s wet. Through a wet Bendigo winter, doors and window sashes take on moisture and physically get bigger. They bind. Come summer they dry out, shrink back, and close normally again.

Reactive clay shrinks when it’s dry. Through a hot dry summer the clay under the house contracts, footings and stumps drop with it, and door frames distort. The binding appears in late summer and eases after the winter rains swell the soil back up.

So the two causes run on opposite schedules:

When it binds	Most likely cause	What it means
Worse in winter, fine in summer	Timber swelling with moisture	Normal. Cheap to live with or adjust
Worse in late summer, eases after winter rain	Reactive clay shrinking and dropping the footings	Ground movement. Usually a drainage question first
All year round, and getting worse	Frame distortion that isn’t reversing	One-way movement. Worth investigating properly
Appeared suddenly and stayed	A support has failed, or something shifted	Worth looking at without waiting

Which means the useful thing to do, if you’re not sure, is wait and watch — through one full cycle of seasons. Reactive clay in central Victoria moves every year, and one season of observation tells you more than any amount of speculation. Why seasonal movement is more pronounced in Bendigo →

If it's an aluminium window, it isn't swelling

A clean piece of logic that saves a lot of guessing: aluminium doesn’t absorb moisture, so it doesn’t swell.

An aluminium window or sliding door that has started binding, catching, or no longer running smoothly in its track is telling you the opening has changed shape. The frame is being distorted by something, because the metal itself hasn’t changed.

That’s structural by elimination, and it deserves attention.

The same logic runs the other way for timber. A binding timber door could be swelling, or could be frame distortion, or both — so timber alone doesn’t tell you much. If you’ve got both timber and aluminium openings in the house, compare them:

Timber sticking, aluminium fine — points at moisture in the timber
Both sticking — points at the openings changing shape
Aluminium sticking — the house has moved, whatever the timber is doing

Sliding doors are the most sensitive of all, because they need the track to stay straight over a long run. A sliding door that’s started to catch mid-run is often the earliest sign of movement in a house.

Which part of the door is catching?

The location of the binding points at the direction of the movement.

Top corner on the latch side — the most common pattern. Usually means the frame is dropping on the hinge side, or the head of the frame is being pushed down. Consistent with settlement on the hinge-side wall.
Bottom corner on the latch side — the opposite. Movement lifting one side relative to the other.
The whole latch edge, evenly — more consistent with the door itself swelling than with the frame distorting.
A visible wedge-shaped gap when the door is closed, wider at one end than the other — the frame is out of square, not the door out of size.
The door swings shut or open on its own — that’s the floor out of level rather than the frame out of square. Sloping and uneven floors →
The door catches on the floor — either the floor has risen, the door has dropped on its hinges, or the frame has settled. Check the hinges before assuming the house.

The pattern that matters most: several doors binding, all on the same side of the house, in the same way. One door is a door. Four doors along one side is the building.

Has someone already planed this door?

Worth looking for, because it’s evidence about the past that you can read in five seconds.

Take a close look at the latch edge of any door that binds. If it’s been planed or trimmed at some point — bare timber showing, a paint line that stops short, an edge that’s been shaved at an angle rather than square — then somebody has fitted that door to a frame that was already distorted.

Two useful conclusions:

The movement isn’t new. Whatever put that frame out of square did it long enough ago for someone to have adjusted around it. On a gold-era Bendigo cottage that may have been three owners back.

The house is now carrying a record of the movement. Doors planed to fit leaning frames, windows painted shut in position, architraves refitted. This is why levelling an old house doesn’t simply undo the damage — bringing the frames back to square makes previously-trimmed doors too small, and gaps appear where the wood was taken off decades ago.

It’s one of the reasons the realistic target on a period house is usually structurally sound and brought back towards level, rather than dead flat. How level an old house can actually get →

When it's worth investigating

Worth acting on:

Several openings on the same side of the house, binding the same way
An aluminium window or sliding door that’s started catching
Binding that’s present all year and getting worse rather than cycling
Diagonal cracking in the wall above or beside the same opening
Floors sloping in the same part of the house
It appeared suddenly rather than gradually
A newer house or a slab, where there’s been less time for a long settlement history

Usually not urgent:

One timber door, binding only in winter, in an old house
Binding that reliably comes and goes with the seasons
A door in a later addition that has always been slightly out
Binding that resolves when you tighten or adjust the hinges

Before assuming the house: check the hinge screws. Loose or pulled hinge screws drop a door within its frame and produce exactly the top-corner binding people attribute to subsidence. It’s a five-minute check and it’s frequently the answer.

If there’s cracking as well: which wall cracks actually matter →

What it takes to fix

In rough order of cost, and most people are further up this list than they fear:

Tighten or replace hinge screws. Free. Do this first.
Plane or adjust the door. Cheap, and entirely reasonable where the cause is seasonal swelling — you’re solving a comfort problem, not hiding a structural one. Worth doing in the season when it’s tightest.
Fix the drainage. Where clay shrinkage is dropping footings, the water regime around the house is the cause, and it’s the cheapest structural intervention there is. Drainage, ventilation and subfloor moisture →
Levelling work — jack and pack where the stumps are sound, or restumping where they aren’t.
Underpinning — only where the ground itself won’t carry the load. Underpinning in Bendigo →

Note the order. Planing a door that binds because of seasonal swelling is a sensible permanent fix. Planing a door that binds because the house is progressively moving is a delay, and the door will need it again. Which is why establishing whether the movement is seasonal or one-way comes before any of it.

Cost ranges for the structural options →

Find out if it's the timber or the house

Five questions — what you’re seeing, what the house sits on, roughly when it was built, why you’re looking into it now, and how to reach you. Mention which season it’s worst in; it genuinely narrows things down.