Bent Outta Shape
When I decided to actually buy a house, one of the things I had to have was a garage. The reason is simple…I hate (HATE) having to un-bury my car when it snows. Having to shovel the driveway is one thing…but shoveling your car sucks. Anyway, when I bought my house, I made sure that it had a garage.
Right from the get go there were problems however. When I moved in, there was no remote for the opener. I didn’t really care much at the time. First off it was nice and warm out, so I didn’t mind parking outside. Secondly, they sell replacement remotes just about everywhere. Three supposedly universal remotes that I can’t take back and $100 later, and I still don’t have a remote for the garage. You know, pulling up to the house, getting out of my car to open the garage door, and then getting back in, and driving in can be a real pain sometimes.
Sometime in there my friends, Jackie and Chris helped me to rewire the office in my house so I could plug in my computer and internets and stuff. We put everything in the office onto one circuit. What I didn’t know at the time, is that one of the outlets was feeding the power for the entire garage. I don’t know who came up with that idea, but its pretty dumb…I mean think about it. If you have your wiring running all over the place and a breaker flips, how to you know which one it is…I mean really. Anyway, once the office wiring was done, I found out that I didn’t have any power in my garage. Suck.
So for the last few months, I have been doing just what I said above…drive up to the house, get out, open door, get in, drive in. Its been a pain. So a few weeks ago, my friends Jeff and Lisa came over, and helped me to restore power to my garage. WOOT! And now its so awesome, in that there is light out there, but still the problem remains with the whole opener remote thing.
In an effort to move past this, I went out last week, and bought a new garage door opener. I had a coupon from Lowes for free install that was about to expire anyway. Right from the get go, there were issues. After I picked out the opener I wanted, it took me 45 minutes to find an associate at Lowes to get an appointment setup for the install. I wish I could say that was the end of this ordeal…but its not. So I finally got the thing and took it home. Naturally, the installer couldn’t do it in the morning one day, so I had to settle for between 12-2 one day during the week. Now I don’t live that far from work…but its still not all that fun to drive all the way home from work, especially knowing that I will have to drive back later.
I pulled into my driveway about 30 seconds before the installer did. What great timing. I opened up the door for him, and he started looking around. I stood there and waited. I was really only interested in standing there until he got properly started, then I was gonna go inside and eat my lunch. He measured the door, and distances from the opener to the rafters. He opened and closed the door a few times. He even borrowed my ladder, to take a look at something. When he climbed down, this is what he said: “This sucks, cause I’m not gonna get paid, but I can’t install this opener here. First of all your door isn’t balanced. A balanced door takes the same effort to open it as it does to close it, and that’s definitely not the case here. Secondly, who ever installed this door did it wrong. they bent the rail supports here, and attached the springs. The high tension springs, which by the way are missing their safety cable, are further bending the rail supports, which is causing the rail not only to bend, but to torque as well. All of this, is putting a lot of stress on the door, and an incredible amount of stress on the opener motor. I would imagine that this would over time result in the opener dropping the door. It sucks, I know, but realistically, you need to get a whole new garage door, rails, springs, etc. I can’t install this today, because it would be a liability. “ And then he left. I had originally been worried that he would be late, or that he would take a long time, and that I would have had trouble getting back to work for the rest of the day. He was there 8 minutes. And to confirm his hypothesis, I have seen the old opener drop the door twice. I have always been right there though, and I have been able to catch it.
And so I am right back to where I started. I have a garage, that I can park in…but I have to get out of my car first to do that. If anyone out there knows a place where I can get a nice cheap door and get it installed with all the trimmings let me know. This is really gonna suck on cold winter days.








