Garage doors

My garage door and I… we do not get along.

This is what the lift mechanism for my garage door opener looks like. Yesterday, for about seven hours, it instead looked like the bad side of a junk yard - gears, screws, sheet metal scattered everywhere with mechanical grease smeared about in odd patterns.

A couple weeks ago, upon returning home from a grocery trip and with sweet visions of resting on the couch in front of a movie with my wife, I attempted to close the garage door, only to be greeted a noise you might expect from a chainsaw and a still opened garage door. Now, I am certainly not a mechanic, but I had a strong inclination that this might be a problem. So, of course, in my best manly fashion, I pulled out my tools and started tearing into the unit in order to diagnose the issue. What I found was not pretty - the most important gear had been converted into a wheel.

After a bit of research on the internet, I found that, since some genius thought it wise to use plastic (maybe clay) gears spinning at hundreds of rotations per minutes to drive heavy garage doors, there is quite a number of places that deal aftermarket garage door parts. I placed an order for a new set of gears, knowing that I could just pop the new one right on and save myself hundreds by not hiring a garage door man.

Then, the package landed on my doorstep (rather quickly, I might add – those internet people are fast) and the “easy fix-it plan in my head” became an actuality. In the plan in my head, I was going to open the unit, pull one old gear off and pop one new gear on. In real life, I removed pretty much every part, scattered them across the floor and rebuilt the unit from the ground up. In the plan in my head, the whole project was to take about 30 minutes. I real life, I worked through the entirety of my Saturday afternoon and evening, missing two fun social engagements. In the play in my head, I wasn’t going to blow the circuit breaker, slam the garage door against the ground, or create any sort of general havoc. In real life, well, you know. But, alas, I finally worked the garage door opener into submission and, at least for now, it operates smoothly. And, as a bonus, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about how one works.

This wasn’t my first misadventure with that garage door. When Ashley and I first bought our house, one of two major items that we required to be fixed was an area of wood rot over the top of our door. Several days and several thousand dollars later (fortunately, not out of our pocket), the door was fixed, we closed on the house, and we began moving into the house.

The first time I pulled into the garage, I made it about halfway in, when suddenly my car halted to a stop. As this happened I heard a bam, followed by a pop, and then a crash. I looked up in agony, as I realized that the bike I had so nicely mounted on my roof attacked on our newly repaired garage door opening, denting the newly applied flashing and squeezing fresh caulk from the seam like toothpaste. The bike was certainly not a winner in the fight either. The popping noise turned out the be the bike’s seat being ripped from the bike and launched somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 feet. I was not a happy camper… Ashley, however, got quite the show from the porch and looking back on it, I wish we somehow knew to catch it on camera – I’m sure it would make quite the YouTube video. Fortunately, there was no serious damage, we were able to get everything fixed back up with minimal hassle.

I think I have learned my lesson, though. A garage door is not my friend.