Replacing and reinforcing our garage door! Cost, process, timing

Replacing and reinforcing our garage door! Cost, process, timing

• 5.18.2020

The other day I shared about our exterior painting and then last week about our new gutters. We're done with hire-out exterior projects planned for the spring! Before we could do paint and gutters, we had some big work to do on our garage door. Replacing and then some!

Garage door replacement

We had figured our garage door probably needed to be replaced since day 1, since it didn’t really work (stopped before getting to the ground and had to be closed manually rest of the way), was dented, was missing the remotes, and had a really loud opener.

Replacing a garage door isn’t cheap, but ours had even more issues. We could tell even just visually from the street that the roof above was totally sagging. The gutter was cracked in the middle from this... you can kind of see in this photo from when we bought the house, but I swear it got worse after that. :P

Versus now...

You may notice something new: the support post. It's steel; my uncle fabricated it for us and he and Jason bolted it in to the concrete and beam above.

You can kind of see the concrete has a patch job underneath--based on this, the sag, and the leftover bright blue paint in two spots on the garage ceiling (lined up with the centered garage door opener) we've deduced that this garage used to have two doors. Someone removed the center part and put in an extra-wide double door. They did some "reinforcing" of the header above the garage door with a million nails and a few pieces of wood, but it was obviously built to have that center support and it sagged over time!!

We considered replacing the header with steel, but that presented a bunch of other issues and got pretty complicated (even with my contractor uncle helping us). Adding a post was the best solution for us. 

We put in a 4x4 when we first moved in to keep the problem from getting worse. Then before installing the permanent solution, we jacked up the sag in 3 places over a couple months leading up to this, to get the header to the right position, then were able to measure and install the new post. 

Here it is with our glamorous temporary band-aid, door partially open cause it was such a pain to close.

Then we replaced the wooden post with the jacks and inched them up slowly every day or two.

Bleh. I am SO glad that is taken care of.

We are feeling so good about having our painting, gutters, fence, and garage door done (and of course the roof, I'll do a post about that soon). So excited to be ready to work on the yard and really enjoy being outside here this summer!