Doors & Windows

Doors and windows are usually where dodgy carpentry shows up first. A door that catches on the carpet. A handle that rattles in your hand. A window you have to thump with the heel of your palm to get open. None of it's dramatic. It just nags at you every single day until someone fixes it.

That's a fair chunk of what I do. I'm Dave, and All Round Carpentry is a local, owner-run outfit covering Wollongong and the whole Illawarra, Helensburgh down through to Nowra. The fiddly precision stuff is my favourite, if I'm honest. Get the clearances right, get the hinges square, and a door that's been fighting you for years just swings shut with a click.

Doors that stick, drop or won't latch

Nine times out of ten a door playing up comes back to the timber swelling, a hinge that's worked loose, or the frame itself moving. The older fibro and brick post-war places around the Gong keep settling, and on a sloping block they don't settle evenly. So the door that hung sweet in 1985 now scrapes the jamb on one bottom corner and nowhere else.

I'll work out which it is before the plane comes anywhere near it. A loose top hinge is the classic one. That's a five-minute job, couple of longer screws biting into the stud, no planing at all. If the door genuinely has swollen, off it comes, I take the right edge down by the right amount, and it goes back up with enough gap to ride out the summer humidity rolling in off the coast. Plane it tight in July and you'll be ringing me again come January, guaranteed.

Latches are their own little war. The frame shifts a few mil, the latch stops lining up with the hole in the strike, and the door won't catch, it just bounces back at you. I'll shift the strike plate or file it out so it grabs. New handle, new deadlock, patching up a door someone's put their boot through, prepping a frame so the security-screen bloke can fit straight off, all the usual.

A few of the regular ones:

• Rehanging dropped or sagging doors and sorting loose hinges
• Fitting handles, mortice locks and deadlocks, and lining up the strikes
• Planing back doors that catch on new flooring or carpet
• Easing sliding and cavity doors that have jumped their track

Windows, frames and sills

Salt air down here is brutal on timber windows. Southerly busters drive the rain dead into the west and south-facing frames, and the bottom of the sill always goes first. You'll cop it when the paint starts bubbling, or you press a screwdriver into the timber and it sinks in like cheese.

Catch it early and I can cut the rotten bit out, splice in a length of treated timber, fill and repaint, and you've saved yourself replacing the whole frame. Leave it and the rot climbs the jambs into the reveal, and now you're up for the lot. Either way you'll get the honest read on where it's at. I'm not going to talk you into the big job for the sake of it.

I also rehang sash windows that have dropped or jammed, run new cords through, free up casements that have swollen shut, and refit beads and putty lines. Window's past it? I'll prep the opening square and true so a new unit drops straight in.

Draught-proofing that's worth doing

Those old timber windows and the gap under the back door are half the reason the lounge never holds its heat through a cold Illawarra winter, and why you can sit there and listen to the southerly whistling in. Decent weather seals, a door bottom seal or an auto drop seal, tighten up the rattly bits. You feel it straight away, and your power bill notices too. Cheap job for what you get back.

Everything's fully licensed and insured. You deal with me, start to finish, no call centre, no subbie you've never clapped eyes on rocking up in the driveway.

So if something's sticking, dropping, rotting or letting the weather in, give me a bell on 0414 007 351 or grab a free quote. Happy to swing by and tell you straight what it needs.