In winter your wood is at its smallest, so a door binding in February is usually hardware rather than damp. Refitting one of your doors runs $120 to $600. Rehanging and re-squaring a whole run after the floor has settled runs $220 to $700.
This is the call Custom Cabinets Lynn takes most in January, and the answer surprises people. The swelling you are expecting happens at the other end of the year. Indoor humidity here drops below 20% through the heating season and climbs into the sixties by August, and your wood swells and shrinks with it. February is when your doors are at their narrowest.
So a door that binds in the cold is telling you something else. Nine times in ten one of your hinge screws has lost its grip. In a house like yours those screws go into a frame that has dried and shrunk around them, or into plaster and lath behind it. Once one lets go, your door hangs off the other one and drops at the outside corner.
The second cause is your box rather than your door. Your base cabinet sits on a floor that has settled, so it goes slightly out of square, and a twisted opening pinches a door that is still perfectly straight. You can see it in the gaps. If one door has a wider gap at the top than the bottom and its neighbor is the other way round, your frames have moved.
The third is a swollen box, and that one is water rather than weather. Damp from a slow supply leak or a dripping trap does not care what month it is, and your sink base is where it shows.
Getting this backwards is the expensive mistake, because you cannot put wood back on a door you have planed. Our cabinet cost guide prices the repairs, and soft-close retrofits covers the hardware side.
Related questions
So which doors stick in summer, then?
Yours will, if they were hung with too tight a gap in a dry month. So we set your gaps for August rather than for February, and a door we fit in the cold still clears once your house gets damp.
Can I just tighten the hinge screws myself?
Try it. It fixes a fair share of the ones we see. If your screw spins without biting, the hole has gone, and driving it harder only makes it worse. We move the screw or plug and re-drill the hole, and that is the real repair, inside your $120 to $600 line.
Is a whole run of sticking doors a bigger problem?
Usually it means the floor under your run has settled, not that every door has failed. We level it, pack it, rehang it and reset every gap across the run. That is the $220 to $700 job rather than a door-by-door repair.