How to Widen a Doorway for a Wheelchair Without Remodeling

Somebody in r/wheelchairs took delivery of a new chair and found out the same day that it barely fits into the bathroom. It scraped the door frame on the way in. The person who delivered the chair mentioned offset hinges, and by the time the poster wrote it up, their husband had already ordered a set.

If a wheelchair or a walker catches on a doorway that's only a little too narrow, and the walls on either side aren't going anywhere, that's the fix to try first. It's a hardware-store swap, and it leaves the door, the frame and the wall as they were. A disability guidebook lists the same hinges as the fix for a doorway you can't make wider.

How do offset door hinges work?

Stand at an open door and look at the hinge side. The door has swung back, but it hasn't left the opening. It stands inside the frame on its hinges, and the door's own thickness takes a slice off the width. That slice is why the person who started a later thread went looking for hinges that don't narrow the doorway.

An offset hinge moves the pivot. One leaf is bent into an L, so the pin sits out beside the frame instead of on it. Open the door all the way and it steps sideways out of the opening, then parks flat against the wall next to the frame. Closed, you can't tell anything changed. Open, the whole gap is clear.

The same hinge goes by swing-clear, swing-away and wide-throw, and one reply in that later thread says it's called handicap door hinges on Amazon. The ones we'd buy are Stone Harbor's swing-clear offset hinges, which come in both corner shapes and are sold singly and in pairs.

How much wider does the doorway get?

A remodeler who wrote up a bathroom job for Builder put the gain at about 2 inches, at very low cost and with no wall work.

In a thread of wheelchair users' tips, somebody puts it at an inch or two. It doesn't sound like much, they add, but it helps a lot. Someone else has them on a bedroom door that can't be widened without moving walls and says the same.

That 2 inches is one contractor's figure for one door, so measure your own gap before you order. Run a tape measure across the chair at its widest point, then across the opening at its narrowest with the door open. Short by an inch or two, and this is your fix. Short by four, and no hinge will get you there.

Is it the frame you're hitting, or the door stop?

Back in that first thread, someone who'd spent 30 years in hardware told the poster not to get their hopes up about the frame. The new hinges take the door out of the opening. The door stop, the thin strip on the frame that the door closes against, stays where it is, and a chair can catch on that instead.

The poster confirmed it. The stop was exactly what they were hitting, and only just. The hardware man's answer was to take off the stop nearest the hinges. It may look odd, he said, but on that side it's only there for looks. If your chair catches on that strip too, taking it off gives you back its width.

For a door that's still a little tight even with the new hinges, somebody in the later thread recommends a metal kickplate along the bottom, which has saved a few of their doors.

Will it work on your door?

Three things to check before you order.

• Room beside the frame on the hinge side. The new pins sit out past the frame, so they need open wall there. The Builder job had barely more than the 3 inches the remodeler says the pins need. The fix there was a recess cut into the wall so the door could lie flat, which is contractor work. With a reasonable stretch of open wall beside the frame, the hinges alone are probably all you need.
• The corners of your old hinges. Open the door and look at one hinge leaf. The corners are either rounded or close to square. The new hinges come both ways, to match the shallow pockets, the mortises, already cut into the door and frame. A coin tells you which. A dime that fits the curve means the squarer kind. A quarter means the rounder one, the more common of the two on US doors.
• How many hinges the door has. Count them, and buy one per hinge.

How to install offset hinges

Unscrew the old hinges, screw the new ones into the same holes and mortises, done. The remodeler who wrote that up says it doesn't get any easier.

Keep the old hinges in a drawer. Nothing else about the door changes, so a renter can put them back in the same holes on moving-out day.

Start with a tape measure, not the hinges. An inch or two short, with open wall on the hinge side, is the case these were made for. Order Stone Harbor's swing-clear offset hinges in the corner shape your old ones have, one per hinge, and give it an afternoon. Whatever still catches after that, check the stop strip before you call a contractor. Once the chair fits through, closing the door behind you is the next small problem, and that one has a cheap fix too.