December 15, 2012

New Garage Doors

Although the detached garage is not an original structure and was built years after our home, it is certainly old as well.  The doors on this garage were heavy wooden doors that probably took a small army to install.  When we moved in, only one of the doors actually had all its hardware and could be opened.  The other door was just panels stacked on top of one another, missing hardware and held together by gravity and a prayer.  

The original garage doors.  The one on the right did not open.

We knew that replacing the garage doors was something that should be done before winter.  Wisconsin winters are no time to leave a vehicle outside unless you want a healthy dose of scraping windows at least twice a week.  Since our previous house had only a one stall attached garage, we were anxious to actually have both vehicles inside for a winter.  

John from Alpine Sales and Service gave us many options to choose from for our new doors.  His website has a great tool that allows you to upload a picture of your current garage and see how various doors would look.  This gave us the opportunity to find doors that would compliment the age and style of our home.  

Two beautiful, working doors.

John worked for two rainy, cold days to remove our old doors and install the new ones.  Not only did he replace the doors, but he installed new tracks, openers, and a manual disconnect lock.  There is no service door on the garage and this might come in handy if we ever lose power.  He certainly went above and beyond for our installation and tackled the challenges of working with an older structure.  With our first snowfall earlier this week, it was great to have our vehicles tucked safely inside the garage where their windows remained dry and frost free.