The door closed fine in April. Now it drags across the frame when you open it, or it sits a little lower than the one beside it, and you are standing in your kitchen trying to work out whether this is a cabinet problem or a house problem.
That is the real question underneath it, and it is a fair one to ask in Allen. We sit on clay, most of us sit on a slab, and August was bone dry. So when something stops lining up in late September, your mind goes straight to the foundation.
Most cabinet doors that stop lining up have moved for reasons that have nothing to do with your slab, and a good number of them are a fifteen minute fix with a screwdriver. A few are telling you something bigger. There is a way to tell those apart without guessing.
What Moved, the Door or the House
A cabinet door hangs off two or three concealed hinges, and every one of them is a small adjustable machine. Over a few years of being opened and closed, the screws holding the hinge plate into the box work loose by a fraction, and the weight of the door starts showing up as play in the hardware. Somebody on a cabinetry forum put it better than we would, saying the weight of the door is revealing the slop in your hardware and their mounting. Nothing broke. The door simply found the bottom of a tolerance it always had.
The second common cause is the door itself changing size. Wood and MDF both take on moisture out of the air, and a painted door with a good finish slows that down without stopping it. A door that grew a sixteenth of an inch across its width looks no different from across the room, but it has nowhere left to go, so it rubs its neighbor or refuses to seat.
Both of those are the door. Your house is a separate question.
Why This Shows Up in Collin County in September and October
Indoor humidity in an Allen house running the air conditioning hard through August sits low for weeks on end. Then the first fronts come through, the rain arrives, the AC stops running constantly, and the humidity inside climbs back up. Doors that spent two months very slightly shrunk go back to full size over a couple of weeks, whether the opening has room for them or not.
That is why the calls cluster now. A cabinet door that closed perfectly in April and suddenly drags across the frame is one of the most common things we hear about this time of year, and in newer subdivisions it is more common still. If you are in Twin Creeks or Montgomery Ridge or Suncreek and the kitchen is only a few years old, the house is still doing its early moving and the cabinetry moves along with it. Somebody going through their first summer in a new build described the humidity causing the doors and cabinets to swell, which is exactly the pattern.
A door that sticks during a wet stretch and frees up again in a dry one is behaving normally. Your house is not falling apart. It is reacting to the weather, the same way the cracks that show up in the walls do every year.
The Screws on the Hinge, and What Each One Does
If you have concealed European hinges, which is nearly everything installed in the last thirty years, this part is yours to do. Open the door and look at the hinge arm. You will find two or three screws, and they each move the door in a different direction.
The screw nearest the front moves the door in and out so it sits flush when closed. The middle screw moves it up and down, which is the one that fixes a door sitting low. The screw at the back handles depth and side to side. Work in quarter turns, and change one screw at a time so you can see what it actually did.
Close the door after every adjustment and look at the gap along the top and down the side against its neighbor. You are chasing an even reveal rather than perfection. On a pair of doors that rub, back one of them off slightly instead of trying to get both exactly right.
Start with the mounting screws, though, before you touch any of the adjustments. Put a screwdriver on the ones holding the hinge plate into the box and snug them up. A surprising number of sagging doors are nothing more than loose screws, and tightening them puts the door back where it started. If a screw spins without biting, the hole has stripped out, and a wooden toothpick with a little glue pushed in and left to set gives it something to grab again.
Straight Answers to What People Ask Us First
Why are my doors sagging?
Almost always because the screws holding the hinge to the cabinet box have loosened over time, so the weight of the door is now pulling it out of square. Tighten those mounting screws first, then use the middle adjustment screw on each hinge to bring the door back up. If the holes have stripped out, fill them with a glued toothpick and re-drive the screw into fresh wood.
How much misalignment between cabinet doors is too much?
A reveal that varies by up to about a sixteenth of an inch across a long run is normal, and most people never see it. Once a gap gets closer to an eighth of an inch, or one door of a matched pair sits visibly lower than the other, it is worth adjusting. Doors that actually rub each other or will not latch need attention regardless of how the gap measures.
Does anyone know why a cabinet door always sticks so bad that it takes lots of force to open it?
A door needing real force is usually either swollen slightly past the opening it was built for, or its hinge has drifted so an edge is catching the frame. Try the hinge adjustment first, since it takes a minute and costs nothing. If the door still binds in humid weather and frees up once the house dries out, the door has grown, and easing the back edge slightly is the fix rather than forcing it twice a day.
When It Is Not the Hinge
If you have adjusted the hinges and a door still will not sit right, look at the box rather than the door. A cabinet that was never installed perfectly plumb and square can hold correctly adjusted doors and still look wrong, which is why a run that was slightly off from day one never quite comes good however long you spend on the hinges. That is shimming and re-hanging the boxes themselves, so it becomes cabinet work rather than a hinge adjustment.
The one to take seriously is a pattern. One door out of line is a door. A whole run going out together, on the same side of the kitchen, at the same time as interior doors stopping latching and little round bumps showing up on a ceiling, is the house talking rather than the cabinetry. Slab movement in Collin County clay is real and it moves everything sitting on top of it at once.
So the useful test is direction. Doors that stick through every wet spell and loosen off every dry one are just moisture. Doors that got worse this year and never came back, with other things in the house changing at the same time, are worth having someone look at properly. Most of what we see is the seasonal kind. You asked whether it was the cabinets or the house though, and there is a version where it is the house.
What We Do When We Come Out
For a door or two this is a short visit. We tighten and adjust hinges across the whole kitchen rather than only the door you called about, because the ones either side of it are usually partway there as well, and we swap out hinges that have worn past what adjustment can fix. Where a door has swollen or warped past saving we can match and replace that one door without touching the boxes.
If you are not sure whether what you have is a quarter turn of a screw or something worth a closer look, that is worth deciding before you start taking things apart. Send us a photo of the run with the doors closed, taken straight on, and we can usually tell you which one you are dealing with. If you would rather someone came and sorted it, we work on cabinets in Allen and the Collin County towns around it, and you can reach us at (469) 242-3276.