Door Installation in San Diego

Most people who call about a door do not actually need a door. They need the door they already own to close properly, and that is a much cheaper conversation. So start there before anyone sells you anything.

Try the free fix first

An interior door that sticks at the top corner, rubs the jamb on the latch side, or swings open on its own is usually not warped. The hinge screws have pulled loose. Standard hinge screws are three quarters of an inch long and they only bite the jamb, which is thin trim lumber tacked to the framing behind it. Over twenty years of slamming, they loosen and the whole door drops toward the strike.

Take out the two center screws in the top hinge. Replace them with three-inch screws that reach past the jamb into the actual stud. Drive them until the door lifts back into square. That is the entire repair, it costs about four dollars, and it fixes a genuinely large share of the doors people are ready to replace.

We would rather tell you that than sell you a door.

When it does not work, the jamb itself has racked, and that is the real signal in San Diego. Racking means the opening is no longer a rectangle. In the post-1960 slab tracts across Clairemont, Allied Gardens, Serra Mesa, and Mira Mesa, that usually traces to slab movement. On the canyon lots below Del Cerro and Tierrasanta it can be the lot itself. Either way, a new slab door hung in a racked jamb will stick exactly the way the old one did, and anyone who agrees to do that without mentioning it is taking your money for a repeat of the same problem.

Slab or prehung, and why the answer is almost always prehung

A slab is just the door. It costs less, and it works only if your existing jamb is square and your new door’s hinge and knob positions match the old ones. You are also paying someone to mortise hinges and bore a latch, which is fussy handwork.

A prehung unit arrives already hung in its own new jamb, hinges cut, ready to shim into the rough opening. It costs more at the register and less installed, because the labor is faster and the result is square regardless of what the old jamb was doing. In any house built before about 1960, and that is most of Mission Hills, Kensington, North Park, South Park, Golden Hill, and Burlingame, prehung is simply the right answer. Those jambs are not square and no amount of planing will fix that.

Standard interior widths run 24, 28, 30, 32, and 36 inches at 80 inches tall. If anyone in the house uses a walker or a wheelchair, or might within a decade, go to 36. A 36-inch door gives roughly 32 inches of clear passage once the slab swings out of the way, and 32 is the number that matters. Doing it now costs a hinge upgrade. Doing it later costs framing.

Exterior doors: skip the steel

Within a mile or so of the water in Point Loma, Ocean Beach, Pacific Beach, La Jolla, or Coronado, a steel entry door is a poor buy. The skin is thin, and any scratch or ding that reaches bare metal starts rusting from that point, usually along the bottom edge where you never look. Fiberglass costs more and does not care about salt at all. Specify stainless hinges and hardware while you are at it, Type 316 near the water and Type 304 further inland, because a beautiful door on corroding hinges sags within a few years.

Solid wood is the honest choice if you want a wood door and you accept the maintenance. It needs refinishing on a schedule, more often on a west or south exposure, and a neglected wood door in this climate checks and splits at the panels.

Fire zones change the specification outright. Scripps Ranch, Rancho Bernardo, Del Cerro, the canyon rims of Tierrasanta, and much of Poway, Alpine, Ramona, and Fallbrook sit in Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones, where Chapter 7A of the California Building Code governs exterior doors. In those neighborhoods the door assembly has to be noncombustible, ignition resistant, or carry a 20-minute fire rating. This is not the sort of thing a big-box special sheet mentions. Ask before you buy the door, not after it is sitting in your garage.

One more San Diego specific: check the jamb and the threshold for drywood termites before you spend on a new door. They are endemic here and they love an exterior jamb. Finding them after the new door is hung is an expensive sequence to run backwards.

What it runs

Independent handymen here bill roughly $80 to $130 an hour against a two-hour minimum, so labor tends to land like this. Adjusting a sticking door or resetting a strike plate: $95 to $210, and often absorbed into a visit you were booking anyway. A slab swapped into a sound existing jamb: $150 to $300. An interior prehung unit set, shimmed, and re-trimmed: $350 to $700 in labor, with the door itself on top. An exterior prehung entry door, which involves flashing, weatherproofing, and a threshold that has to sit right: $700 to $1,800 in labor. Sliding patio door replacement runs higher still, $900 to $2,500, though if yours merely drags, new rollers and a cleaned track are $200 to $400 and frequently all it needed.

Note where that crosses a legal line. Business and Professions Code section 7048 exempts minor work under $1,000 in combined labor and materials, raised from $500 by AB 2622 on January 1, 2025, provided no permit is required. An interior door sits comfortably under it. A full exterior entry replacement often does not, and a wider opening never does, because widening means a new header and structural work always needs a permit and a licensed contractor. Splitting one job into several invoices does not move it back under the line. It only removes the license and bond you would otherwise have recourse against.

Worth knowing before anyone asks for money up front: California caps the deposit on a home improvement contract at 10 percent of the price or $1,000, whichever is less.

Put it on one visit

Doors are the classic thing to bundle, because the two-hour minimum swallows a single one and barely notices a second. Most houses have three or four doors that have quietly stopped latching. Walk through and try them all before you call. Other small jobs in the San Diego catalog include ceiling fan installation and gutter cleaning, and the full small-repair list sits on the San Diego handyman page. If the opening needs structural work, San Diego also has vetted carpentry and electrical partners, and you can browse all handyman services or browse all services by city.