Servicing the garage door

 

Servicing the garage door

When we had our garage door replaced in 2023, we signed a contract that would cover an annual service.

In January this year, someone ‘phoned and asked if it would be acceptable to conduct the service earlier than usual. We agreed, paid, and thought no more about it. Imagine our surprise when, two weeks ago, we were contacted to arrange a date for the annual service!

After much discussion with two garage door installers, both in the same town, we concluded that our details, including email address, telephone number, and house address, had somehow been relayed to a company that had not installed our door. Alarm bells rang!

Barry had contacted several companies, prior to deciding on a door, and his details had been recorded. The company, not the one that installed the door, had merged data files, and in the process his details had become mixed with someone else’s. Data migration, when data is moved from one system to another, can cause a number of problems.

It took some time to convince the manager that his company had not supplied our door. The customer he thought he was dealing with did indeed have exactly the same name as Barry, but lived in a different part of the country. The service that customer was expecting was performed on our door.

Eventually, we found that nothing nefarious had occurred. No-one had bought our data. We breathed a sigh of relief.

 

The Garage Door

 

The Garage Door!

Internal view. There is a thin opaque strip at the top that allows daylight into the interior.

This post is in response to those commenters who requested pictures of the new garage door! (You’ll be so glad you asked!)

Some people may have been misled by ‘We’ve been together now for forty years’ – that was actually a reference to the house and garage having been conjoined for (more than) 40 years, not the joining together of himself and me. My apologies!

Anyway, back to the door since I’m sure you’re gasping for the details.

 It’s a Hörmann sectional door and we decided on white. There was a long waiting list for coloured doors as they have to be ordered ‘specially’. In any case, we would have taken forever to decide, for example, which shade of green or tone of yellow we required. Colours fade, too, or so we were informed, and white doors are always in stock. Even so, we had to wait a few months before ours could be installed.

The installers arrived at the allotted time and set to work cheerfully. Some of the work had to be done outside as a new frame had to be constructed. They worked so hard throughout thunder, lightning and torrential rain. They discovered there was a minute chip on one of the panels and took photographs of it to relay to the manufacturer. Honestly, we wouldn’t have noticed it. They will return in a couple of weeks’ time to replace the damaged (!) panel.

The door mechanism, though not silent, is a great improvement on the clanking, grinding efforts of the old door. The video did not upload successfully!

It is so nice to go into the garage now. The door fits beautifully, meaning howling gales and homeless mice are not allowed in, making the space pleasant to work in. We may even put a car in there! The cats will be disappointed, though. They used to enjoy prowling round the garage, seeking small rodents to play with.

Hörmann make external house doors, too, but they are incredibly expensive, so we shan’t be looking to them for our front door!

                                            Exterior view

Gilbert has acquired a new name - Gilbert the Geek. He was discovered in his bed savouring the remote control fob for the garage door. 

 

 

We’ve been together now for forty years . . .

 

We’ve been together now for forty years . . .

It’s not just the door that needs to be replaced, The trellis above, which is meant to be festooned with honeysuckle, is in dire need of repair. The honeysuckle chose to climb the drainpipe instead, despite my best efforts.

Actually, it’s rather longer than forty years that the garage door was first installed. It was already in place when we moved into the house.

It’s an ‘up—and-over’ electrically operated double door that has done good service through the years. I remember, with a shudder, the day the children and I were in the garage and about to get into my very small car to travel the 12 miles to school. As the door began to rise, my son’s fingers were caught in the mechanism. He suffered no lasting damage and I wonder if he recalls the incident. Certainly, though a little crushed, there were no broken bones or blood and he went to school as usual. I don’t even remember any bruises.

Eventually, the door began to complain about being opened and would stop before completing the exercise. Sometimes, the gap it left was sufficient for someone to slip through, but at other times, limbo dancing would have been a useful skill. We no longer kept a car in the garage as mice had taken up residence and we didn’t want them chewing important wires under the bonnet.

The writing was on the wall. Repairing the door, now rather bent and battered, was out of the question. The gaps around the door, at every extremity, were now large enough to enable huge rats to enter – well, perhaps not – but they definitely allowed ‘cool gales’ to ‘fan the glade’ providing arctic conditions in the garage.

There is a whole subculture dedicated to doors. We already knew that since we had been researching front doors for several years, our existing door showing signs of deterioration. We became au fait with door furniture, mortice deadlocks, escutcheons, door frames and the rest, coming to no conclusions and leaving it all ‘for another day.’

The garage door had to be replaced. The garage is integral and has an interior door to the house. There was a very real danger that it might become inextricably stuck at some inconvenient point between open and closed. Thus the search began for a replacement garage door. It was an easy enough exercise, we thought, despite our wrangles with the front door. It’s just a garage door. Simple!

We didn’t anticipate spending much time reaching a decision. How wrong we were! Given the extraordinarily wide range of doors in every material and colour known to man and my husband’s nitpicking painstaking analysis of everything, I feared we would never reach a decision. I mean, analysis is good, commendable, even, but I have a low boredom threshold and a high inclination to headaches so usually drift off. I am awoken startled into awareness only when I realise I am being asked my opinion.

Anyway, we made a decision. Success! The next part of the exercise was finding a company to supply and fit the door. Several were contacted and gave wildly differing estimates. More analysis ensued. Finally, we he settled on one and today’s the day the teddy bears have their picnic the defunct door is being replaced.

 It’s taking five hours!