Incidentally, what is the best solution if I do want to increase the gap? Should I, as I stated, just file down the top of the door (as I have on one of the doors), or is there a better solution?
My dad used to plane the top of the door if it wasn’t too far off.
Just be careful if it’s a hollow core door!
Even if it is, you still have about an inch and 5/8 or so of leeway according to the husband. He’s flat out cut down hollow core doors and just reinserts the top piece.
In most homes with forced-air HVAC, you don’t want doors that fit tightly, unless you have a room that you specifically want to exclude from the HVAC system, or unless your HVAC system has separate feeds and returns for each room.
I’ve sawn off tops or bottoms of several doors for various reasons. I find that a circular saw with a good clean-cutting blade and a ruler hand-clamped to the door as a guide works just fine, and only takes a moment to set up and cut, once I have the sawhorses out and the door there.
As Missy2u says, even with a hollow-core door, there’s plenty of wood to work with. We’re talking about taking 1/8" or at most 1/4" off, I hope!
“He IS … The Least Interesting Man in the World.” 
Example! {NSFW}
This championing of gaps is very odd. I have never, anywhere I have lived, had doors that could accomodate something over the top and still close completely. Never.
To answer earlier comments: there are doors I rarely shut, so that is where I have used over-door tools and I assumed others did the same.
My home has mandated fire doors and in all but one room you can fit something over the top. The gap isn’t visible.
Everywhere I have ever lived had doors that could accomodate door hanging things and still close.
Sorry, but I very much doubt that. I build houses for a living, and almost every door has a small gap at the top that is big enough to accommodate a tiny strip of metal. The house I currently live in was built in 1937 and it’s doorways are built the same way.
My house was built in 1939. Not one of my doors can accommodate the strip and close. Not one. (And they are original)
Hmmm.
Over-the-door appliances is a long overlooked market niche.
Prolly because the door or the door opening have changed shape in 75 years.
I have personally designed and built several houses. As a handyman I have hung many doors. It’s almost impossible that the situation you describe is correct. Houses (and wood especially) expand and contract with the weather and humidity. If there is no gap on your door how do they operate when they swell due to the seasons?
Oddly, a wreath hanger is the only over-the-door anything I’ve ever had problems with. But also the only over-the-door type thing put on an exterior door.
I have been testing all my door hang things on all my doors, and so far the only one that has passed has been a flocked-metal single hook, and only on one door, which is one of two exiting my bedroom, the one that was originally built as a door to the outside. (A renovation many years ago simply enclosed it, without changing that wall at all… My bedroom is dead center of my house, with no wall having an “external” side. (What is the correct term?) The wall that used to be is unchanged from that time: next to the used-to-be-door-to-the-outside, which is a framed-glass door, is a full-sized old-fashioned sash window that is exactly the same construction as all the other old-fashioned sash windows all over my house. It just opens to a tiny area about five feet wide which has French doors leading outside. It is one of the quirks of my house that charmed me… It immediately became the Dog Porch.)
So far, then, all my internal doors are “tighter” than the once-external door, perhaps because, as a door subject to the elements directly, it had to have a little room to swell.
Because I think you’re a crazy person, and because I happen to have a piece of 0.065" steel of the type that most over-the-door hangers would be fabricated from sitting right here, I just walked around my house (built in 1912 with some new construction from the 80’s) and tried to cram it in the gaps in the 13 doors I found, both interior and exterior. There was one door it wouldn’t fit in without a bit of a shove, and the rest accommodated it easily. Many would have probably fit a piece twice as thick without a problem.
I suspect your experience is the exception and that over-the-door hangers do not in fact deprive a door of its essential doorness in most situations.
ETA: I realized I forgot about a door, and I’m nothing if not thorough, so I’m happy to report that it fit in that door quite easily too.
Hi Stoid, clearly we have an influx of shills for the Over-the-Door Hanger Manufacturers of America in this thread, posting their love for these devices, but I can feel your pain.
I hate those gadgets. From time to time my wife buys something or other that hangs like that and then after a year of opening and closing there are gouges in the frame, paint missing, gouges in the door stop, and marks all over the door where the unwanted device hung.
My doors have plenty of space at the top, but for one of these things to work it needs to fit between the door and the stop (the moulding on the inside of the door frame), and that is a fit that is usually pretty tight. It causes the aforementioned gouges and often causes the door to twist a little bit, poking the top corner out.
Besides the tight fit, they move around based on the changing load, twisting this way and that. Invariably twenty pounds of clothing hangs in an unbalanced formation off of the device, making it cant this way and that, contributing to yet more gouging.
I think I have convinced her to stop buying them.