Services › Door, Window and Lock Repair › Door, Window and Lock Repair in Coatesville

Door and Lock Repair in Coatesville, PA

The original doors on these houses are solid wood, they are worth keeping, and when one stops closing it is nearly always fixable in an hour.

Prefer to text? Feel free to include a few photos — it helps us give a faster, more accurate estimate.

Keep the door

A front door on an early-1900s Coatesville rowhome is typically solid wood, often with original hardware, and it is a substantially better door than the hollow-core or thin steel unit that would replace it. It is also part of what the house looks like from the street, which on a row of similar houses is most of its character.

When one of these stops latching, the cause is almost never the door. It is that the opening has moved over a century — a fraction of an inch, which is all it takes — or that the hinges have worn, or that the strike has been chiselled out progressively by previous attempts.

The fix is shimming hinges, relocating or replacing the strike plate, and adjusting the threshold and weatherstripping. That is an hour of work on a door worth keeping.

What the job includes

• doors that will not latch, stick, or have dropped in the frame
• hinge, strike and threshold adjustment — usually the actual fix, and not a new door
• lock and deadbolt replacement, and rekeying to one key
• storm doors and screen doors
• sash windows painted shut, sash cord, and weatherstripping

Locks, and getting onto one key

These houses usually have more doors than people expect — a front door, a back door, a basement door, sometimes a vestibule door — and after a few decades they are on separate keys with at least one missing.

Rekeying everything to a single key is quick and cheap. If you would rather go keypad, a keypad deadbolt works on these doors provided the door closes properly first — a motorised bolt cannot force a misaligned strike the way your hand can, so the alignment work comes first either way.

Often paired with: Smart Lock Installation

Winter is when you notice

You notice this one in the cold, and there is a reason. Wood moves with humidity, gaps that were invisible in July become a draught in January, and old weatherstripping that has gone hard stops sealing.

Draught-proofing an original door — sweep, weatherstrip, and getting the door to close evenly against the stop — is inexpensive and gets you an immediately noticeable difference in the front room. It is one of the better small jobs to have done in autumn rather than in February.

Frequently asked questions

Serving Chester County

This page covers Coatesville. See all of our door, window and lock repair work, or what we do across Coatesville and the rest of Chester County.