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Yeah, so I really appreciate you coming by, Tom. My pleasure. Our house was built in the 1940s. We bought it about four years ago, my wife, my parents, and I. We completely gutted the entire place: brand new plumbing, yeah, brand new plumbing, electrical, wallboard, insulation. We did the kitchen ourselves, hung the cabinets and the counters. You did it all, even the tile work? Yeah, it's been a process. It's a lot of work, but very rewarding. Yeah, I mean, look what you've done. It's beautiful. Yeah, thank you. One thing that is driving me insane is these doors. My two-year-old son lives down the hall here, we sleep here, and our coats are here, and I have to feed the cat in the morning. I wake up at four o'clock in the morning to go to work. When I go down the stairs I have to open the door, and I hear that squeak at four o'clock in the morning. It's like an air raid siren. So it wakes your son up? Wakes smoke up, yeah. Wakes them up, no problem.
Well, that is loud. There are a lot of reasons why a hinge can squeak, and one of them is alignment. It could be a hinge misaligned from the door to the jamb, or hinge to hinge. If I look right up at this top hinge here, you can see that these barrels aren't right on. Have you tried anything at all? Yeah, I've tried different types of lubricants, but to be honest, a week or a couple weeks or a month later, the squeak just keeps coming back. So what's happening is they could be wearing back and forth, and when the lubricant wears out, it starts to squeak. Sure. So what I want to do is take some of the stress off one hinge at a time, and to do that I'm going to knock the pin out. All right. It's still squeaking a little bit. You can also see how this hinge pin holds the hinges together. Pull that out, the door drops down. Sure. All right, so I'm going to knock this one in just a little bit, okay, put it back. All right, I just put that one in there loose. Now go after the second one. That hinge pin came right out, not a lot of stress on that. Pretty quiet, though. Yeah, it quieted it right down. Let's put it back in and see if that works. But I also don't have this one all the way down. Yeah, still pretty quiet. So it could be this one right here, that hinge pin is not down all the way. I don't even know if I have to do that bottom one. Let me see if I tap it back down and see if we get the squeak back. I think it's a top hinge, and I think it has to do with the alignment of the barrels right here that I showed you. But let me show you on a hinge over here. Okay. Now, you said you've tried some lubricant? Yeah. All right, so if I was dealing with a squeaky hinge like that, the first thing I would grab is some multi-purpose oil, right here, that you get at the hardware store or the home center. What you'd want to do is pull the hinge pin up just a little bit and take a couple of drops and put them right on the side, just like that. Let that flow down. Put a little drop there, a little drop here, a little drop here. Then drive the pin back and move it back and forth. Yeah, I tried that. It lasted a couple weeks, but the squeak came back. All right, so you tried that. The next thing I would do is pull out the pin altogether and take some of this lubricant right here. It's a dry graphite, and I just squeeze a little of the powder down the hole, maybe even shoot a little bit up from the bottom. Take the pin, put it in a little bit, lubricate the pin, drive it down, and push it back and forth to wear it in. Yeah, I tried that. It did work a lot better than the multi-purpose lubricant, but after a couple weeks it just didn't do the trick.
Okay, well, I think it's an alignment problem right here, as I pointed out on the door, and also the gap spacing between each hinge. Look right here: if I move this one, see how it's moving up and down from one another? That creates a gap for the hinge to flow easily without any resistance. Sure. And I think, by that barrel on your door, because the barrel is out of alignment there, it may be too tight on one side. Okay, so what I want to do first is see if we can align that, while it's on the door. All right, sounds great. So let me show you this hinge right up here. If you look at this bottom one, it's bent in like that. Yeah. Okay, so again, we have the gap on this side but not on that side, and as you go up higher, we've got a gap here but not here. Sure. And this top one actually looks like it's bent. Oh yeah. So what I want to do is remove this pin and see if I can knock it back in place. Okay. So now that pin's out, so I'm going to take the pin and try to use it to bang this over just a little bit, and do the same thing on the bottom, see if I can straighten it just a hair. This one's got to go over a little bit. All right, let's close the door, pick it up for a little bit, and get this pin in. All right, let's try it. Okay. Sweet silence. All right, so I think your son will be able to sleep now. Thank you very much, I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Sweet silence indeed, nice job. So how often do you see that, is it common to have a hinge bent like that? Well, those are inexpensive hinges, so the metal is really soft, and you could bend it if you drive the pin down too hard with your hammer, or if the hinge is apart and you drop it on the floor, that could bend it just a little bit too. You get what you pay for. Right, exactly. Thanks for watching. This Old House has a video for just about every home improvement project, so be sure to check out the others, and if you like what you see, click on the subscribe button and make sure you get our newest videos right in your feed.