How to Replace a Door Hinge

Featured Pro: Eric Stromer
Category: Home Improvement
Time: 4:06


ERIC STROMER: Hey, I’m Eric Stromer, and this is your GMC Trade Secret.

The hinges on your doors are usually invisible and go unnoticed. But after several years, they often get covered in layers of paint or start to rust and squeak when you open your door.

Now, here’s a door where the hinges have been painted over several times and they’re starting to stick a little bit. There’s a real easy solution to this. You can go ahead and replace each of the hinges one at a time, and I’m going to show you how.

First, what you do is you take yourself a utility knife and go ahead and score around the hinge to kind of cut that seal of paint where it matches the hinge. Be careful you don’t come too far into the door, because you could easily chip this portion away. So go ahead and score the top and the bottom, and then on the side as well. And then you also want to score it on this door jamb side as well.

So now that we’ve scored all those areas around these hinges, when we remove the hinge, it won’t pull the paint off the door. That’s why we did it.

Next up, safety glasses. And what we want to try and do is expose these screw heads where the slot is so that we can easily unscrew it with a screwdriver. And I’m going to use a cordless drill with one of these wire brushes on it to get that paint off. But first I want to put some blue tape around it to prevent taking the paint off the door itself. You’re going to go ahead and tape it at three different points – the bottom of the hinge, the top of the hinge, and right on the side there.

Now we can go ahead and take our wire brush and start to get the paint off those screw heads. All you have to do is concentrate on the screws themselves. Now, once you see where your screw heads are, you can take either a screwdriver or a utility knife and go ahead and channel those slots out a bit.

Now, once you have those slots nice and channeled out, you can easily unscrew each screw. You should be able to pry your hinge out relatively easily. Next up is to take the screws off of this side, and go ahead and do each hinge as you go. You want to do one at a time, fasten the new one again, and then go to the next hinge so that the door doesn’t have to actually come off the door jamb and the hinges themselves. See, with the right preparation, that hinge comes off really easily.

Now, this is key. You can’t just replace these with any hinges. I’m taking this old hinge to the hardware store to match it up with a replacement that’ll fit in the same spot in my door. Otherwise I’m going to have to chisel the door to make the new hinges fit, and that’s a bigger project than I need.

Well, it looks like the one I need. It’s the exact same size, and it has the same number of holes. I think I’ll get three of these.

So here’s the hinge I got from the hardware store, which is exactly the same size as my old hinge. It fits in perfectly. Something to consider: When you take the screws out of the old hinge points, sometimes those holes and openings are going to be a little bit big and your screw won’t seat as firmly as it could. So a great remedy is to take a couple of toothpicks and go ahead and put it in the hole, just like that. Put them in as far as you can. Usually you can get about three in there. And then break it off right there at that hole surface point. That gives you more meat for the screw to bite into.

Now, our next step is just to go ahead and install that hinge. That looks great. Now, keep in mind that you’re going to replace all three hinges, but you can keep the door on by doing each hinge one at a time. And it looks pretty good for now. I’m going to do a little preventative maintenance. I’m going to lubricate the hinges to make sure that they run smoothly for a long time. Look at that.

Take a look at the hinges on the doors in your home and replace the ones that are getting old.

I’m Eric Stromer. That’s your GMC Trade Secret.