Treated A Creaking Door (32/366)

"I hate to be a kicker, I always long for peace,
But the wheel that does the squeaking, is the one that gets the grease."
~ Josh Billings


This might sound silly. That's okay. But this really was a first for me - and speaking of sound, I can't believe it took me this long to get this sound to stop.

Our front door has been creaky for longer than I can remember. It was almost part of its character. We were totally used to it. But over the years, its gotten louder, the creak has gotten longer, and it's kind of taken on a strange new sound all its own. The other day when I opened the door, someone downstairs said, "What's that noise? Is that a whistle?". I knew I should probably do something about our creaky door.

Then today as I was tidying up the linen closet, I noticed the can of WD-40 I had found when I organized the closet a little while ago. The can was so old, I recognized the price tag from decades ago. I decided today was the day to use it.

First, here's some video of how the door sounded before (yes, it's still decorated from our LOST party in 2010):


Hilarious, right? No mic was hooked up, and I was just using my iPhone for that video. It was placed a good 6 feet away from the door.

So I started by spraying the front and back sides of the top hinge with the WD-40. Then I sprayed the top of the middle hinge - the WD-40 seemed to be running through the hinge, so I figured I didn't need to also spray the sides of this one. It was indeed running through the middle hinge, and was actually dripping onto the bottom one. But I hit the back of one too for good measure. Our hinges were totally dirty - the dripping WD-40 was now black. Nice.


And, after the magic of WD-40:


This was neat. I usually just see creaking as a minor irritation if anything at all - like I said, we were kind of used to our front door making noise - it was like our notification system that the door was opening. But it's really very cool in stealth mode.

Related Links:
WD-40 10032 Multi-Use Product Spray with Smart Straw, 12 Oz.