Humid areas like Michigan, South Carolina, and Florida require a lot more TLC from homeowners because interior spaces within the home and small business get even moister than the outdoors. This means you’ll need to know how to maintain exterior doors, windows, doors, closets, and cabinets inside your home or office because they can become exponentially more difficult to open or keep in good repair.
Because places by the ocean and surrounded by lakes are usually cooler than towns and cities further inland, many houses and apartments won’t have air conditioning. Air that’s more humid and hot therefore moves inside of interior spaces and becomes even more dense, causing more problems for homeowners. If your home or small business is in an area where high humidity is an issue, here are some tips and tricks that will help you keep your doors, windows, cabinet doors, and other wood openings in your house from falling victim the steamy, tropical air that can ruin them.
First, try to leave as many windows and doors open as possible as frequently as you can. Leaving doors and windows open will help you maintain exterior doors in humid environments because the inside of the entryway will not be soaking in more moisture than the exterior side of the door. When this happens, you will likely experience sticking caused by the swelling of the door. This can also happen to interior doors, bathroom doors, and windows, too. Before taking any extreme measures such as shaving down the door to make it fit within its frame, see what happens if you leave windows in your foyer, front room, and kitchen open for a week or so. You may very likely see a big change within just 72 hours.
To maintain the paint or finish on both sides of an exterior door in a humid environment, clean with a dry rag first, then with wood soap following the instructions on the bottle. Next, dry the surface on the inside and outside of the door and leave the door open so that the interior side is exposed to the same amount of sunlight and air as the exterior-facing side of the door. Try to leave the freshly cleaned door open like this for as long as you can—the more equal exposure after being cleaned, the better it will be for the entire door.
If your door is still sticking after leaving it open for more than a week, try taking it off of its hinges, doing a deeper clean with wood soap, and leaving the unhinged door outdoors where it can receive equal sunlight on both sides of the door (for example, don’t leave it to face down on the grass where only one side receives light). Before reattaching the door to the frame, clean the hinges and hinge pins to ensure that no sticking is occurring because of the assembly of the door itself.
Maintaining an exterior door means more work in a humid environment than just about any other type of environment, and that also includes the exterior side of doors in snowy environments being exposed to the salt from the street that’s used to melt snow. To keep your exterior door from losing its varnish or coat of paint, during the winter months you may want to invest a little more time cleaning the outside of the door with a warm, wet cloth followed by a dry cloth to remove salt and other chemicals that can destroy paints and lacquers.
Knowing how to maintain exterior doors may just be the beginning, but leaving doors and windows open will help resolve any issues you’re facing that is caused by humidity. Additionally, almost anything that helps you maintain an exterior door issue like swelling will also help to swell in windows and cabinets, too. If you have a door or window that sticks so badly it will not open or close, ensure the issue is not painted—if it’s painted shut you’ll likely need the help of an expert to get it open again. The same is unfortunately true of a door that has been swollen without reducing in size as the weather changes—this issue requires the door to be resized for the doorframe it’s in. However, once you’ve had the door resized, you can keep swelling from revisiting as fiercely or as frequently by leaving doors and/or windows open as much as you realistically can. Knowing how to maintain exterior doors in humid environments means knowing exactly how much you can leave your doors and windows open in your neighborhood!
