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How to prevent doors from rattling
The Problem
Have you ever been lying in bed on one of those windy nights with your door closed and your window open and felt the urge to rip your door off its hinges because it rattles incesantly? Does your door rattle like someone is trying to get in every time someone opens another door in the hallway.
Dorms have a lot of air pressure differences and air currents. More than they should. This causes doors to slam and rattle. The rattling is also due to the fact that the door latch has a lot of play for most dorm room doors.
The Solutions
Well then. Let's put an end to that. There are two basic procedures which can ameliorate the situation.
Pad the stop
The strategic placement of one those two-sided foam adhesive squares on the edge of the door facing the stop can keep the door from rattling because of air currents. Make sure to place it so that it still allows easy closure and latching of the door, but prevents the door from rattling. You may need more than one piece of foam adhesive depending on what the gap between the door and the stop looks like. The optimum arrangement pushes the latch snug against the room-side edge of the hole and prevents the door from moving back and forth with the latch hitting this metal piece.
Pad the latch
Another method is to pad the latch itself. We don't want to mess with the latching mechanism on the door, but we can pad the inside edges of the metal hole into which it latches when the door is closed. Duct tape does the job nicely. This dampens the metallic sounds that come when the door slams or rattles. When couple with padding of the stop, this essentially eliminates door noise. Sleep well.