Pocket Door Repair

Signs you need this service

• The door binds, scrapes the jamb, or will not close fully
• It has dropped and now catches on the floor guide
• The door has come off its hangers and is stuck inside the wall
• You hear grinding or rattling from inside the wall cavity
• It rolls open on its own or will not stay put
• The pull is loose or the latch no longer meets the strike

How a pocket door is built

Unlike a patio slider, a pocket door hangs from above. Two hangers ride in an overhead track fixed inside a split-stud wall cavity, and a small guide at the floor keeps the bottom from swinging. There is no bottom track at all.

That means when a pocket door misbehaves, the cause is almost always overhead: a worn hanger wheel, a bent or sagging track, or loose mounting hardware letting the whole assembly drop. The symptom you notice at the floor is a consequence of something happening at the ceiling.

Getting to it without gutting the wall

The reflex fix is to open the wall. Sometimes that genuinely is necessary, but on most residential pocket doors the hardware can be reached by removing the door stops and the head jamb trim, which are designed to come off. From there the door can be lowered out, the hangers replaced, and the track inspected and re-anchored.

Where drywall does have to come out, we open the smallest access we can and put it back cleanly. We will always tell you before we cut anything.

What we replace

• Hanger assemblies, upgraded to sealed ball-bearing wheels rather than the nylon rollers many builders used.
• Overhead track, straightened or replaced where it has bowed under load.
• Floor guides, the small part that most often gets broken and is most often missing entirely.
• Jamb hardware, including flush pulls, edge pulls, and privacy latches.
• Soft-close conversions, which are a worthwhile upgrade on heavier doors and on any door that gets slammed.

Before you call anyone

If the door has come fully off its hangers and disappeared into the wall, stop pulling on it. Forcing a loose panel inside a cavity is how the track gets bent and how the drywall gets damaged from the inside, which converts a hardware job into a wall repair.