To adjust French doors, set the hinges first and the frame second. Turn the hinge screws a quarter turn at a time until the gap down the closing edge runs even. Then move or bend the receivers on the frame until the handle closes without force. Test after every turn.
Work in this order every time. Hinges, then gap, then receivers, then lock test. Skipping to the receivers because the handle feels stiff is what turns one problem into three.
Eight steps, and most doors need three of them. Two turns on one hinge fixes the majority of complaints.
Take a photo of the hinge before you start. It tells your installer what you have if the job turns out to need parts.
The adjustment points depend on how the door was built, so identify yours before you start turning anything.
Our French doors and terrace doors run an espagnolette with three closing points and a friction brake on the top of the door sash. The handle drives both. Turn it to horizontal to open the door.
That matters for adjustment, because a stiff handle on this type of door is almost always the receivers rather than the hinges.
A dropped French door catches on the frame at the bottom of the closing edge, and the gap along the top opens up towards the handle. On double doors, the two leaves stop meeting cleanly in the middle.
Raise the door at the top hinge first. The top hinge carries most of the weight, and lifting there pulls the closing edge back up without twisting the leaf.
On flag hinges, the height adjustment sits under the cap at the hinge pin. On timber and alu-clad doors, check the hinge screws into the frame before you adjust anything, because a hinge working loose in the timber drops the door again within weeks.
Our fitting guidance puts the fixing points at the top and bottom of the side jambs as close to the hinges as possible, and asks for at least one extra fixing point along the head and the sill on double door units. A double French door that keeps dropping often has a frame that flexes because those extra fixings were skipped.
Compression is what stops draughts, and you set it at the frame rather than at the hinges. Increase it and the leaf presses harder against the weather stripping.
On our terrace doors, the receiver on the frame is the adjustment. Bend the tongue inward or outward until the door closes firmly against the frame. Our own product guide treats this as a seasonal job, because both timber and PVC move between summer and winter.
Use the paper test to know when to stop. Close the door on a sheet of paper and pull it. You want firm resistance without tearing, and the same resistance at the top, the middle and the bottom of the leaf.
Different resistance at each height means the door sits out of square. Go back to the hinges and even the gap up first, or you will chase the draught around the frame all afternoon.
Check the weather stripping too. Soft and springy rubber seals. Hard, flat or shiny rubber has perished, and that needs replacing rather than squeezing harder.
Toe and heel is a glazing technique that squares up a sagging door by repacking the glass inside the sash. A glazier moves the packers to the bottom of the hinge corner and the top of the lock corner, so the weight of the sealed unit braces the frame diagonally.
It applies to uPVC French doors, where the sealed unit sits behind clip-in beads and the sash can flex.
A uPVC leaf that drops back out of square within days of every adjustment is usually a toe and heel job rather than a hinge job.
Leave it to a glazier if you have not done it before. Dropping a sealed unit is expensive, and a badly packed door comes back worse.
On our timber and alu-clad doors, do not attempt it. The glass is held with locking clips and comes out from the interior side of the sash using the tool supplied with your unit, and getting that wrong risks the seal and the finish.
Fit a door stay or a restrictor, because no friction brake holds a door against a gust. Our product guidance states this plainly. The friction brake cannot hold the door sash in place in strong winds.
That is physics rather than a fault. A glazed French door leaf is a sail, and a friction brake is designed to hold it at rest, not to resist wind load.
One habit protects the hardware. Never pull the door shut while the handle sits in the closed position. It loads the espagnolette and the brake in a direction they were not built for, and repeated over a summer it wears both.
If the doors slam regularly, a floor mounted or wall mounted stay solves it for the price of an afternoon. Adjusting the hinges will not.
Set the friction brake. On our terrace doors it holds the leaf anywhere between 5° and 90°. Open the door to the position you want, then turn the handle of the open door to the closed position to lock it there.
Do the opposite to release it. Turn the handle back before you move the leaf, and never force the door against a set brake.
If the brake no longer grips, check for oil on the slide rail. Our maintenance guidance is to keep the slide rails on friction brakes clean, oil-free and free from paint. Oiling that rail is the most common way people stop their own door from staying open.
The flush bolts are not dropping fully into place. On a double door, only the operating leaf carries a handle. The second leaf is held top and bottom by flush bolts, and that is what most people miss.
Open both leaves and work the bolts by hand. They should slide freely and land in their sockets without being pushed.
A bolt that catches has either picked up dirt in the socket or lost alignment because the frame moved. Clean it, oil it, and if it still misses, move the socket a millimetre with the door open rather than forcing the leaf.
Adjust the second leaf into square before the first one. Everything about a double door hangs off where the passive leaf sits.
Release the friction brake and swing the leaf past the brake's travel. On doors fitted with a brake, the arm limits how far the leaf goes until you disconnect it from the frame.
Read the operating instructions for your specific door before you disconnect anything. On our doors, the sash lifts off its hinges at 90°, and if a brake is fitted it has to come off the frame first, which is a two person job.
If you want the doors flat against the wall every summer, that is a specification question rather than an adjustment one. Ask about it before you order rather than after.
Four faults look like adjustment problems and are not.
Adjusting the hardware is normal maintenance, and our own product guide treats hardware adjustment as a finishing detail rather than a manufacturing defect. So a seasonal receiver adjustment is yours to make. A fault you cannot adjust out is worth a call to us instead of a longer session with an Allen key.
