garage door

Our garage door installer completed the installation of the garage door this afternoon. The house is now fully secure, so we can move ahead with a lot of work inside this week. We're expecting the air conditioning system to be complete (through the rough inspection) and the remaining parts of the interior partition framing should be complete this week, too. If all goes well, we should have drywall going up by the end of the week.

The garage door is eighteen feet wide so that we can drive both of our cars through with room to spare. We opted for flush panels, painted white, to match the rest of the house as much as possible. While the opening is eight feet tall, the position of the structural members inside the garage meant that the door itself needed to be seven feet tall. This leaves us with a fixed panel across the top of the opening.

Each section of the garage door is reinforced with large steel structural members on the inside, which prevent the panels from buckling under the pressure from hurricane-force winds. The tracks for the garage door are attached to a galvanized steel framework which is welded to the house's wind girts.

The garage door panels are similar to the wall and roof panels in the house. A layer of dense foam insulation sits between two layers of steel.