What This Covers
Most of this is the list that lives on the fridge door: things that stick, sag, leak air, or came loose from the wall. One item is a normal call, and nothing here has to be an emergency to be worth doing.
Openings
- Doors that stick or will not latch, planed and rehung
- Deadbolts, knobs, and strike plates that no longer line up
- Weatherstripping and door sweeps ahead of winter
- Window screens rebuilt after a windy spring
- Slider tracks and rollers packed with farm dust
Hardware
- Cabinet hinges and drawer slides reset or replaced
- Shelving, closet rods, and towel bars anchored into studs
- Grab bars set into real blocking, not just drywall
- Wall mounts for televisions and heavy pieces
- Battery smoke alarms replaced where you cannot reach
Surfaces
- Drywall repair, from nail pops to a full patch
- Caulking at tubs, showers, sinks, and countertops
- Interior trim and baseboard put back right
- Exterior caulk and touch-up paint before the freeze
How a Repair List Usually Goes
Most of these calls start with an apology for the size of the list. A door that catches on the jamb. A drawer off its slide. A towel bar that came out of the wall with the anchor still attached. People assume the number of items is what makes the job. It is not. Setup, access, and the drive out are what make it, which is why a batch of small things in one visit goes further than any of them alone.
The repair you describe is usually the symptom. A door that will not latch is rarely a bad latch. The house moved around it, and in Central Washington houses move a lot: bone dry summers, hard freeze and thaw winters, and big swings between afternoon and night. Wood shrinks and swells through all of it. Wind and farm dust pack slider tracks and chew up screens, and hard water crusts everything that stays wet.
So we look at the cause before deciding on the fix. Sometimes that makes the job smaller than you expected. Sometimes the honest answer is to replace the thing instead of resetting it again, and you will hear that even when the repair would have been the easier day for us. Anything with wiring, a water line, or gas goes to the licensed trade, and we will tell you which parts of your list those are. Estimates are free, so write the whole list down.
Questions
Repair Questions
The things people actually ask before booking, answered without the sales version.
Is it worth repairing, or should I just replace it?
The part is rarely what decides it. A cabinet drawer, an interior door, a window screen: the piece itself is the small end of the job, and fitting a new one takes about the same work as fixing the old one. What decides it is whether the thing failed on its own or because of what is around it.
A drawer that came apart is a drawer. A drawer that came apart because the cabinet box is racked is a cabinet. Doors work the same way. A worn latch gets replaced, a jamb that has moved gets shimmed and rehung, and if the floor under it has moved, that is a structural question for an engineer rather than a carpentry fix. We look at the cause first, and if replacing is the honest answer you will hear it.
Why do doors and windows here stop working in the first place?
Central Washington moves wood around. A long dry summer shrinks a door and the jamb it sits in, then the weather turns and both swell again, so a door that latched cleanly in one season binds in another. Trim opens at the miters for the same reason. Outside, a freeze and thaw winter splits caulk lines that were sound in the fall, and once a joint is open, water gets behind it.
The other half of it is dust. Wind off open farm ground packs slider tracks, screen frames, and door sweeps until they drag, bind, and tear. Hard water leaves its own crust on anything that stays wet. None of this is dramatic, and all of it is why the same short list of repairs turns up house after house here. Caught early, most of it stays maintenance instead of becoming replacement.
Is one small repair enough to call about?
Yes. Small is the normal size of this work. One sticking door, one grab bar, one screen that blew out in a spring wind. You do not need to save up a list to book a visit, and no one here treats a single item call as a waste of a trip.
That said, a list goes further than a call each time. Setup, tools, and the drive out get spread across everything you have lined up, so the drawer slide, the caulking, and the closet rod handled in one visit take less of your day than three separate trips would. Walk the house first and write down everything, including the things you stopped noticing years ago. There is no charge for the estimate, so nothing is lost by listing an item and then deciding against it.
Can you take care of the wiring and plumbing while you are here?
Anything with wiring or a water line goes to the licensed trade, and we will say so before the work starts. Electrical and plumbing are separately licensed in Washington. Gas work, structural engineering, and roof tear-offs go out the same way. That line is not us being careful for the sake of it. Work done across it becomes your problem later, not only the contractor's.
What we do is everything around it. The blocking behind a grab bar, the cabinet a sink sits in, the drywall and trim that close a wall back up after the specialist is finished, the door that has to come off to get equipment through. Plenty of jobs are half carpentry and half something else. Tell us the whole thing and you will get a straight answer about which parts are ours.
Ready to get it done?
Tell us about the project, or call and talk it through.