Sticking Doors and Windows in Schertz

Check the two free causes before anything else

Open the door and watch where it makes contact. A door rubbing along the whole length of one edge has grown, and wood grows when the air is wet. Plane that one down in a dry month, or wait for fall and it often frees itself. Then check the hardware. Pull the door toward you by the knob and watch the top hinge. If the leaf shifts against the jamb, the screws have stripped out of soft pine and the door has tipped, which reads exactly like a house problem and is not one. Longer screws into the stud behind the jamb fix most of those the same afternoon. Only when both come up clean is the frame worth suspecting.

What the Schertz soil record actually says

Barbarosa is the series on record for Schertz, and the number that matters to a door is its linear extensibility, 7.5 percent. That is the high shrink-swell range. Picture clay resting on an old gravel terrace. The gravel lets water go, the clay above it swells and shrinks as the water comes and goes, and the first few feet under a slab take most of that travel. Sunev, Houston Black and Lewisville also turn up around Schertz. Nobody can tell you from a map alone which of them your lot drew. Soil gives you the odds. A reading of your floor gives you the answer. The mechanism is laid out in how Central Texas clay behaves through the seasons.

High shrink-swell matters to a door for one reason. When clay under one slab edge loses volume through a dry stretch, that edge settles, the wall above leans with it, and every opening framed into that wall loses its square. The door is the same door it always was. The hole stopped matching it, which is why foundation-driven doors bind at a corner instead of rubbing along an edge, and why they come in clusters near one part of the house. The full pattern test, including what the scrape marks around the strike plate are telling you, lives on our page on foundation repair for sticking doors.

Windows read the same way, with one exception

A window is an opening in a wall just like a door, so it racks on the same geometry and binds at the same corners. The exception is metal. Aluminum frames grow in direct sun, so a sash that fights you on a hot August afternoon and slides easily again the next morning is thermal, not structural. Windows that bind year round, on one elevation of the house, near the doors that are also acting up, corroborate movement rather than weather.

The two Schertz cases that are not the slab at all

Not every house in town sits on a slab. The older streets off FM 78 include pier and beam homes, and on those a sticking door usually traces to a beam, a block or a sill under the floor rather than anything at the perimeter. The floor dips, the wall follows, and the door in that wall drags. That repair is crawlspace work at the framing, a different scope from perimeter piers.

The other case is water. A supply line or drain leaking under or beside the slab feeds the clay a steady drink, that patch swells, and the floor above it lifts. The giveaway is that the symptom ignores the calendar. Doors driven by seasonal clay loosen up in the wet months, while doors driven by a leak stick in January as hard as in August, often alongside a water bill that crept up. The leak gets found and fixed first, then the floor gets re-measured, the sequence we describe under foundation repair after a plumbing leak.

What the free survey settles

An ICC-certified inspector starts at the openings you pointed out, puts a level on each jamb and head, then works a digital elevation meter room by room across the whole house. That turns a hunch into a map of where the floor actually sits. If your sticking doors line up over a genuine low area, you see it, with a scope and a price. If they do not, you get no repair needed in writing plus a dated baseline to measure against later. About a third of our inspections end that way, and sticking doors land in that third more often than most symptoms. The visit and the report are free either way.

What the repair looks like when it is the foundation

When the readings confirm settlement under the cluster of sticking doors, the fix is piers at the low sections, priced per pier at about $600 to $1,000 installed. We set steel and hybrid piers only. Both carry a lifetime transferable warranty, and every pier job gets a performance follow-up inspection each year afterward so the correction is tracked rather than assumed. Once the lift pulls those openings back toward square, most of the doors start latching again without being touched. They were the gauge, not the engine.

Where this fits with the rest of Schertz

This page covers one symptom. For how the clay behaves across the rest of town, and what we find in each era of Schertz housing, our Schertz foundation repair page has the wider picture and the city registration details.