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Modifying doors
Contents
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 incessantly? 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, it seems. This causes doors to slam and rattle a lot. The rattling is also due to the fact that the door latch has a lot of play in most dorm room doors.
The Solutions
Well then. Let's put an end to that. There are three 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 coupled with padding of the stop, this essentially eliminates door noise. Sleep well.
Call B&G=
Sometimes the latch itself is broken and the door never completely closes. When Mission was just remodeled (Fall 2003), some of the latches closed incompletely, meaning that unless the resident made sure the door was shut by pulling on the door handle when he or she left, one could break into the room simply by giving the handle a sharp downward/inward shove. B&G should know about this problem; it affected 3 of the 5 doors in my Mission suite.
