Doors and windows sticking: which pier moved?

When doors start to drag, swing on their own or refuse to latch, and windows bind in their frames, the frame of the home has often moved at one or more piers. If a relevel fixes it, that typically runs $450 to $800 for a singlewide and $750 to $1,400 for a doublewide. If one or two piers have failed, rebuilding each typically runs $150 to $400.

HUD’s own test for an adequately leveled home includes “the exterior doors and windows of the home do not bind and can be properly operated”. A door that binds is the home telling you something.

Check this first

• Is it one door or several? One door could be the door. Several, especially toward one end, points under the home.
• Which way does it swing? A door that swings open or closed by itself is hanging out of plumb, often because the floor under it has dropped.
• Look at the corners. Cracks running from the corners of doors and windows, or a new gap where wall panels meet, go with a frame that has moved.
• Doublewide? Look at the ceiling seam down the middle. A gap there means the two halves are not in the same plane.
• After a storm? If the sticking started after wind or a tree hit the home, read storm damage reset.

Common causes and fixes

Why it happens on Hot Springs ground

The NRCS maps the hillsides around Hot Springs, Rockwell and Lake Hamilton mostly as Bismarck, Sherless and Clebit soils, 10 to 40 inches over shale or sandstone, much of it steeply tilted, with a depth to rock that can change within a few feet. Footings a few feet apart can sit on different ground. Toward Piney, Jessieville and Royal, Carnasaw soils add a clay subsoil that the Garland County survey rates moderate for shrink and swell, and the Saline County survey, on the Saline County side of Hot Springs Village, rates it high. Where a footing sits in clay that changes volume, or in a bottom that stays wet from December to May, a pier can drop or lift a little at a time.

Wet weather also swells wooden doors and frames on its own. NOAA’s Hot Springs station shows May as the wettest month on average. If the sticking comes and goes with the weather but the readings under the home are fine, it may be the door.

When to call us

Call when several doors or windows stick, when cracks open at panel corners, or when a doublewide’s ceiling seam gaps. We read the frame at every pier and write down what we find. If the readings are fine, we tell you so.

Related: mobile home leveling, pier and footing repair, and if someone already releveled and the doors got worse, leveling done wrong. Ask whoever does the work for their Arkansas Manufactured Home Commission license number and check it.