Why Are My Windows and Doors Sticking?

Contending with sticking doors and windows is more than just an inconvenience at the moment. These conditions can often indicate that something larger is wrong within your home. More likely than not, you may find yourself contending with some kind of foundation, crawl space, or basement damage that’s allowing unwanted moisture into your home.  

Your doors and windows don’t start to jam for no reason at all. Instead, you can most often blame sticking doors and windows on the influence of hydrostatic pressure. 

Contending with Hydrostatic Pressure 

Hydrostatic pressure builds up outside of your home after heavy rains or snow runoff. As that moisture gathers outside of your foundation, basement, or crawl space, it can cause the molecules making up those structures to rapidly expand and contract. As those molecules change sizes, they’ll place the structures in question under a significant amount of stress. To compensate, your foundation, basement, or crawl space may crack. Once one of these structures has cracked, it will be even more difficult for you to keep moisture out of your home, as rain and snow runoff will have a direct line into your home. 

Let that moisture have too much of an impact on your home, and your foundation can start to prematurely settle. As your foundation sinks, the structural supports keeping your home in place can falter. In turn, more moisture can make its way into your home, causing your door and window frames to crack. Similarly, the lack of support from the aforementioned structures can cause your frames to shift in place. 

Other Problems 

Cracks are most often caused by hydrostatic pressure, but that isn’t the only cause that may force your doors and windows to stick on a more regular basis. Certain insects can also cause your home’s structural supports to start to falter. As such, you may be able to attribute a crack in your wall to the presence of termites, for example, or carpenter ants in your home. As these critters eat away at your structural supports, the drywall in your walls may begin to pull away from the damaged supports, causing cracks to form in your greater wall. 

In other cases, the construction team who built your home may have made a mistake while setting your walls and floors. In these cases, you may be working with green structural supports or supports that aren’t in the right place. If it turns out that your structural supports weren’t established appropriately, your door and window frames may start to shift out of place as gravity has its way.