Fire door is sticking, scraping or binding on the frame or floor in London

You've noticed it over a few weeks, probably. The door used to swing shut fine and now it's dragging on the carpet, or you're putting a shoulder into it to get it open. Maybe it catches right at the top of the frame, or it swings free for most of the arc and then binds hard in the last few inches before the latch. Some people describe it as the door feeling swollen - like it doesn't fit its own frame any more.

This is one of the most common calls we get across London's fire door stock, whether it's a communal door in a post-war block in East London or a flat entrance door in a converted terrace in the south east. It's rarely just an annoyance. A fire door that doesn't close and latch properly isn't doing its job.

What it might mean

A few things can cause this, and it's genuinely not always the same answer twice.

Most often, on doors that scrape the floor and have gone slightly out of true, the leaf has dropped on worn hinges - this is a high-probability cause and usually comes with an uneven gap round the frame. Moisture swelling is another regular culprit, particularly in older timber doors where seasonal humidity makes the leaf expand and bind against the frame - that one tends to ease off and come back depending on the time of year. Sometimes it's simpler than that: a new carpet or a threshold strip fitted slightly proud is physically in the way of the door's swing. And occasionally, on doors that have clearly been worked on before, over-trimming or a poor original fit has left the clearances wrong from the start - that's a lower-probability cause but we do see it, especially in converted flats where the door's been cut down to fit an odd-sized opening.

None of these are things you can diagnose from a quick look. They often look identical from the outside.

How urgent is it?

If the door won't self-close fully, or it's on an escape route and people have started wedging it open to avoid the hassle - that's not a wait-and-see situation. Book it in same-day. A fire door that's propped open isn't providing any protection at all, and a door that doesn't latch reliably is exactly the kind of defect that gets flagged the moment anyone does a proper check on the building.

If it's a minor scrape that doesn't stop the door closing and latching, you've got a bit more breathing room - but it won't fix itself, and it'll only get worse as the hinges wear faster carrying a misaligned leaf.

What you can safely check

Don't plane it, don't cut it, don't take a saw to the bottom edge. That might solve the scraping for a week, but it can compromise the door's certification and its performance in a fire - and there's no coming back from that without proper remedial work.

What you can do: notice whether it catches at the same point every time you close it - that's useful information for whoever comes to look at it. Check there's nothing loose in the swing path, like a mat or a bit of furniture that's crept into the way. Beyond that, leave it alone.

What we check

We start with the hinges - wear, fixing security, whether the screws are even biting into sound timber any more, because loose fixings are behind a lot of drop-related sticking. Then we measure the clearances round the whole leaf and at the threshold, because the gap pattern tells us a lot about whether this is a hinge issue, a swelling issue, or something structural with the frame. We check the leaf itself for bowing, swelling or old impact damage that might not be obvious at a glance. And once the door's been freed up and re-hung properly, we test the closer speed and the latch action - because there's no point fixing the swing if the door still doesn't shut properly at the end of it.

How it's fixed

Depending on what we find, it's usually one of a few things: repairing, packing or replacing worn hinges; a certification-safe realignment of the door and frame; or resetting the closer once the leaf is moving freely again. All straightforward jobs for anyone who's spent time on this kind of stock - but they need doing properly, because a fire door that's been packed out with the wrong material or trimmed without reference to its test evidence can fail its next inspection even though it looks fine day to day. That's the kind of thing our fire door repairs work is set up to catch and put right.

As a London fire door company, we see the full range - timber FD30 doors in council estates with failed intumescent strips and knackered closers, non-rated doors fitted as flat entrance doors in period conversions, composite doorsets let down by the wrong ironmongery. The fix is rarely the same twice, but it's always about getting the doorset back to how it was designed to perform.

Call it in today if the door won't self-close, if it's on an escape route, or if anyone in the building has started propping it open to get round the problem. That's not a defect you want sitting there until someone else finds it first.