How to Maintain Interior Doors

There are several things you can do to maintain the interior doors of your home or office. Some of these things need to be done once or twice a week while others can be done once every few months or years. The idea is to keep the interior doors where you work and live looking good while also working well. The following are some things you can do to learn how to maintain interior doors anywhere in your home or small business office:

Once a week, use real oil wood polish to clean both sides of every interior door with a rag. Using real oil instead of a polish spray will extend the life of the wood while using a cloth rag will help those oils get deeper into the grain than paper towels can.

Once every 30 days or so, use a wood soap to clean wood doors inside your home or office before cleaning them with oil. This keeps wood grain looking bright and tidy. The natural oils in the wood polish are only able to get so much muck and grime off—using wood soap will help you lift stubborn stains or areas where liquids have been spilled on a door, and so on.

Once each year, remove the door from its hinges and clean unreachable places that you’ve been missing during weekly cleanings every week. This is also a great time to remove and clean the doorknob assembly if it is sticking at all. When you take both doorknobs and the internal assembly out and off of the door, you’ll be able to tell almost immediately if there is sticking and whether it’s occurring in the knobs or inside the door. By simply wiping these parts down, oiling them up with WD-40 or a similar product, and reassembling them after the door is ready to go back on the hinges, you should have resolved any sticking within the doorknob assembly. If you do check, clean, and oil doorknob assemblies every 12 months without fail, chances are much lower than you’ll ever have to deal with sticking doors when you least expect it.

Before putting any doors back up in their respective doorframes, remember to clean the hinges and hinge pins, too. They can be cleaned and lubricated with WD-40 or a similar product. Cleaning and oiling your hinges and hinge pins will also ensure you don’t deal with sticking that occurs on the other side of the door. And, if you do this once every 12 months, chances are you will not run into any issues with sticking.

Now that you know how to maintain interior doors, there’s much less that can happen to the doors inside your home or small business that has the power to slow all activity down to a halt. For example, if you cannot get a child’s bedroom door open, or if the front door of your business doesn’t open, you’re in for a long day of fixing problems that could have been easily avoided by maintenance and TLC. Clean your doors regularly and keep them in good repair—because you don’t want to deal with what can happen if you don’t!