Garage Door Repair &
Installation in Seattle, WA

The older the garage, the more likely you are looking at extension springs. Seattle detached garages came with light wooden doors, and a pair of extension springs stretched along the horizontal tracks was the normal way to counterbalance them. Those setups still work. Two things have usually changed since: the door has been swapped for something considerably heavier, and the springs are decades past their cycle life. A tired extension spring carrying more door than it was ever sized for is the single most common spring failure we replace in the older neighborhoods.

We carry torsion and extension springs on the truck. Where headroom allows, converting an old extension setup to a torsion shaft over the opening is usually the better answer: the door balances more evenly, the track stays clear, and a break stays contained on the shaft. Where a low detached garage simply will not take a torsion tube, we fit correctly rated extension springs with containment cables threaded through the coils, which is what stops a snapped spring becoming a projectile. Either way the door is balanced by hand afterwards and the opener force reset. The warning signs are in our broken spring guide, and what drives the price is in the spring replacement cost guide.

A new door on a Seattle bungalow is a facade decision as much as a mechanical one. Craftsman houses in Ballard, Wallingford and Fremont carry a carriage house or recessed panel far better than a flat raised panel, and on a detached garage that door is the largest surface facing the alley or the street. We bring samples and show them against your actual house in your actual light rather than asking you to choose from a catalog page. Steel, carriage, contemporary and fully insulated are all available, and the old door is removed and hauled away as part of the job.

On permits. In Seattle, swapping a door for one of the same size in the same opening is generally treated as maintenance rather than a permitted alteration. The moment the opening changes width or height, the header is touched, or structural framing is altered, it becomes work the city expects to see, and adding a new circuit for an opener brings an electrical side to it as well. We tell you which side of that line your job falls on before we start, and we do not guess on your behalf. If there is any question, the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections is the authority, not us. Still weighing a repair against a replacement? See when a garage door is worth replacing, or the new door installation page for the full process.

Detached garages create the two opener problems we run into most in this city. The first is power. A garage built in the 1920s that got its electricity as an afterthought may be running off a single lightly loaded circuit shared with the light, and that is worth confirming before a new opener goes on it. The second is headroom: many of these garages have a low ceiling with rafters close over the opening, which a standard chain or belt rail does not love.

A wall mounted jackshaft opener solves both at once. It mounts beside the torsion shaft, uses no ceiling rail at all, and leaves the space above the door open. It is also quieter, which matters if the garage shares a wall with converted living space. For attached garages we normally fit a belt drive. One thing worth raising early rather than discovering afterwards: Wi-Fi from the house does not always reach a detached garage through two exterior walls, so if smart features matter to you we check signal before we commit to a model. More detail on our opener installation page.

Cables and rollers are where the Seattle climate shows up first. A detached garage with an unheated slab and a gap under the door sits damp most of the year, and the parts that suffer are precisely the ones made of steel wire and bearings. Cables fray strand by strand down at the bottom bracket where they sit closest to the floor, and rollers with unsealed bearings seize until they drag along the track rather than roll down it. A door that has started making a noise it was not making last year is usually one of those two things.

A fraying cable does not get better with time. The cables carry the weight of the door against the spring, and when one lets go the door drops on that side, twists in the tracks, and commonly takes the track and a panel with it. We replace cables in pairs, never one, because the second is the same age as the first. Nylon rollers with sealed bearings are the upgrade genuinely worth making in this climate: quieter, and they do not seize the way bare steel does in a damp garage. Hearing something new? We sort the sounds by urgency in what your garage door noise is telling you.

In a wet climate a garage door rarely fails suddenly. It drifts. Springs lose a little tension, hardware loosens from vibration, rollers dry out, the bottom seal hardens and stops sealing, and the opener quietly raises its force every year to compensate for all of it. None of that is visible from the driveway until something actually breaks. A tune up is the visit where somebody catches the drift while it is still cheap.

What that visit involves: a balance test with the door disconnected from the opener, spring tension adjusted, every hinge, roller and bracket checked and tightened, tracks aligned, bearings and springs lubricated with the right product rather than the one that gums up, weather seal inspected at the bottom and along both sides, opener force and travel limits reset, and the safety reversal tested with an object under the door. On the wooden doors Seattle still has plenty of, we also look hard at the bottom rail, because that is where water gets in and rot starts. Details on our maintenance page.