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Tips For Building Your Own Garage

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:57:09 +0000

Home improvement projects increase the value of your home, while building skills and giving you a hobby to relax with, making something worthwhile with your hands. One of the simpler home improvement projects to tackle this coming summer is building a new garage.

Before building, you need to figure out how big you need the garage to be. Think about not just putting your car in the garage, but what other commonly stored items will be placed there. Checking out floor plans will give you a good estimate to work from.

Once you’ve determined the size of the garage, it’s time to determine what materials you want to use to build it, whether it’s pre-treated or pressure treated wood or a metal frame and siding arrangement. Both metal and timber garages come in pre-fab construction kits, making the selection one that’s driven by your needs.

If you’re in a colder climate, the timber garages will generally have better insulation than the metal ones. If you’re in a climate with a lot of sunlight, the metal garages will hold up better to the extremes in temperatures.

The first step in construction is getting a concrete slab laid down. This will be the anchor point that your garage is built on. Do yourself a favor and hire a good contractor for this – pouring cement is harder than it looks and it’s very easy to ruin your garage with a badly poured slab and the consequent poor drainage that results.

Assembling your garage from a kit is mostly a matter of following the instructions. With some help from your friends, it’s not unreasonable to put up a pre-fab garage or other building inside of a weekend. It’ll take some quality time with hammers and a nailgun, but the end result will raise the value of your property and give you grist for stories along the lines of ‘Yeah, remember when we put up Bill’s garage?’…

Kinds of Garages

While we mentioned that there are pre-fabricated kits for building your garage, it was understating the extend of these things. A brief internet search on ‘types of garages’ will give you an overwhelming number of answers about this type of construction.

While we mentioned choosing space requirements early on, look for garages that have some expansion ability. In particular, several vendors make garages that are modular components, allowing you to customize the covered area to suit your needs directly and even add on to them later.

If you’re building a timber garage, always go for pressure treated lumber. This is lumber that has had a good coating of protective agents applied by high pressure jets of steam, making it resistant to rot, water, mildew and insects. Even better, it doesn’t need an annual coating of preservative treatment every spring, doing so roughly every three years is good enough.

For a more form follows function construction method, nothing quite beats the benefit of pre-fab metal buildings. They’re often enamel coated and built from high grade steel and aluminum and will last for years with no real effort needed to maintain them. Further, unlike a lot of wooden buildings, they usually have cable mounting brackets allowing you to run wiring for power tools or a small office into them and can be insulated in their void space with spray-in insulation. While this is a bit more involved than throwing up a garage, it can have its merits as well – as families or home-based businesses grow, you’ll eventually need either an office or storage space for your records and backups.

Finally, for appearance, look at how the garage will situate in your yard – will it provide shade, a convenient place to hang a basketball hoop? Do your intended color schemes match your house or complement them? Does your local homeowners association have regulations and guidelines for this sort of building?

Always look, when working on improving your property, for the things that will add the most value for the least amount of effort and investment.

Garage Doors

admin — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:59:30 +0000

Popular home improvement magazines and TV series dedicated to administering face lifts to new or older homes and giving them more curb appeal frequently specify garage door replacement as one of the most important projects on their short list. For decades, contractor grade garage doors were and are standard equipment on most new construction—doors usually made of a lightweight metal or inexpensive wood, and lacking any kind of style; let alone a style that matches that of the house.

Many homeowners have for years, tolerated homes with garage doors that are just good enough to cover the opening and hide the clutter that lurks behind them. As long as the doors remain, even marginally, functional, most of homeowners will consciously or unconsciously ignore their shortcomings and place them far down their list of home improvement projects. More discerning owners, though, will view a replacement garage door as not merely a cosmetic improvement that will elevate the home’s curb appeal, but as an investment capable of increasing the security and energy efficiency of the property. The three-pronged benefits that quality garage doors offer, all contribute to a more livable home for the current owner, and increased value when the home goes on the market.

Homeowners owe it to themselves to become familiar with the more specific benefits of garage door replacement. Security is a big consideration for every homeowner. Garage doors with inadequate locking mechanisms, and constructed from flimsy metal of inferior wood products are easy targets for vandals or burglars seeking to gain entry into your home. The same inferior doors are also extremely vulnerable to damage from the high winds, especially those of tornadoes and hurricanes. In a violent storm, a failing garage door could be the first point of penetration point a violent storm wind and rains need to penetrate the interior of a home.

An overlooked item is the role of—or, in many cases, the lack of a role—a garage door in protecting a home from extremes of heat or cold. The garage door usually the is the homes largest opening to the outside world. It’s important that the door have efficient insulating properties.

Many homeowners don’t realize that, starting in 2009, qualifying, insulated replacement garage doors will not only add a great deal of style and beauty to your home, will also give a taxpayer a deduction of up to $1,500 on their federal income tax return. For details on this benefit, see section 25C of the International Energy Conservation Code.

Materials and styles for garage doors are no longer of the “one size fits all” variety. Beautiful, sturdy, well insulated doors are available in an incredible range of metals, manmade materials, and quality woods, with finishes appropriate to the style. Modern, colonial, carriage-style, Victorian and craftsmen are some of the popular style doors available. Homeowner can find off-the-shelf models at modest prices that will complement or coordinate with the architectural style of their home. If the homeowner’s requirement is more specialized, many door manufacturers will make custom models to the owner’s or architect’s design specifications.

Genie Garage Doors Opener

admin — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:52:19 +0000

If you own a home with a garage door more than likely you will also have some kind of automatic garage door opener. If your contractor installed the door opener when your home was built in most cases it was the cheapest model available. Using garage doors pricing to select a garage door opener is usually not a good idea. Frequently these automatic garage door openers begin to fail within a few short years. Not having a quality garage door opener installed in your garage will not only lead to an inconvenient failure but also could put your home and family at risk.

Genie garage doors openers have been around for a long time and have set the standard for automatic garage door openers. There are probably more Genie garage doors openers in American homes than in any other brand of automatic garage door opener. They manufacture a full line of home garage door openers including several models that can easily installed by just about any home owner.

You can find Genie garage doors openers for sale in most of the big box home improvement stores including Home Depot and Lowes. The staff of each of these retailers will help you decide what garage door opener you need and provide helpful information on installation. In most cases you can install your genie garage doors opener within 3 hours if you have the assistance of a second person. A single person can also install a garage door opener in about 4 hours. In most cases installation will only require regular household tools to accomplish.

In addition these home improvement stores will also arrange for professional installation if desired. In most cases unless you are going to need several wired keypads a professional installer will complete the job of installation in less than an hour. Genie garage doors opener systems feature wireless keypad systems that make installation very simple. The Genie Homelink and Intellicode one systems will assure that your garage will not be opened by thieves. Every time the garage door is operated the operational code is changed and there are more than 4 billion different combinations so it is unlikely that someone will be able to access your garage with a remote scanning device.

The Genie Excellerator garage doors opener will open your garage at twice the speed of a conventional garage door opener. This is a great feature if you are worried about security. Instead of waiting for your garage door to open the Excellerator will open fast enough to allow you to continue move your vehicle into the garage without stopping.

Unfortunately the major flaw in the system is that it only closes the door at normal speed allowing an intruder to enter the garage before the door closes. No doubt that this feature was fostered by some idiot company attorney that was worried about liability. I guess they figure that it is much better to be murdered by an intruder than be foolishly hit by a closing garage door.

In general you will find that Genie garage doors openers are a great way to efficiently open and close your garage doors. We would have preferred to have a way of integrating the system into the home security system. Never the less we do recommend Genie garage doors openers for your home.

Garage Door Tips For Renovators

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 06:12:51 +0000

If you are a Perth resident renovating your home, it is quite likely that at some point you’ll decide to improve on the garage doors. Those doors do, after all, make up a large share of the visible section of your house, and naturally you want them looking their best. Maybe you’re adding an entire garage to your home, or completely rebuilding one. Maybe you have a garage, but the garage door is totally decrepit and in need of a replacement from scratch. Maybe you have a perfectly serviceable door, but you’d like to investigate improving it, maybe turning it into an automatic garage door with a remote control, so you can park your car in the evening without needing to get out and wrestle with cold aluminum.

If you fit any of those descriptions, you’re reading the right article to find out how garage doors can be fitted in Perth. Below, you’ll find a few tips on how to fix up your garage door so that they are as good as if you were in a brand new house.

#Replacement or upgrade

Suppose you’ve moved into Perth, into a house with a working manual garage door, and you’d rather have an automatic doors. You have three options: live with the existing doors, take out the garage doors and put in a set of new, automatic garage doors, or adapt the existing garage doors by adding an automatic opener.

Adding an external motor to open and close your existing garage doors is unlikely to get you the smooth performance of a custom-installed garage door, although if you find the right vendor and install carefully, it is certainly possible. Perth’s garage door market contains both good and bad companies, but shop carefully and you’ll be OK. You will have something that is perfectly acceptable for normal use. It will also be (often, but not necessarily) substantially cheaper than starting from scratch. Finally, it will be in keeping with the style of the rest of your home, assuming that the previous occupants had at least a little consideration for the appearance of the building.

External motors can be added to almost any form of manual garage door. A skilled workman will be able to automate a garage door in a way that will take up hardly any space, and will not change the motion of your existing garage doors.

#New garage doors for an old garage

What about a second scenario? Your Perth home has a garage, but the garage door is useless. It’s not uncommon to move into a house in Perth where the garage has been used as a storeroom, and find that the garage door hasn’t been opened for years. In such a situation the garage doors’ mechanism is likely to be rusted, the metal or plastic bent out of shape, and the garage door is unusable.

Fortunately, it isn’t hard to replace a garage door on an existing garage. Garage door specialists in Perth will often offer to dispose of your old garage door, and to build a set of custom garage doors that will fit right into the gap. If you can get such an offer, it is usually a good idea to accept it. You will find that this option is preferable to the cost of disposing of your old garage door in Perth yourself.

You also don’t need to worry much about non-standard sizes and shapes of garage. It is now possible to obtain doors for any shape of garage – this may involve custom garage doors, but if you are guided by Perth’s professionals you will not find that to be much of an inconvenience.

#Pretty things

If you’ve bought a house in Perth for renovation, it’s quite likely that you have some strong ideas about how you’d like to make it look. Don’t let your garage doors get in the way of that. In other words, don’t settle for doors which look as though they are just the ’standard model’. Be adventurous, and dare to demand something that compliments the look you are planning for you home. Many different designs are available today in many different colours including a metal timberlook colour which looks very much like the “real deal”., or actual timber doors can be made in almost any design you can imagine. So dream a little before you invest in your garage door, and you could end up with something unusual and delightful.

Do-it-Yourself Your New Garage Door

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 10:46:08 +0000

Most companies that sell garage doors offer complete line of services including delivery, removal of old door, and installation of the new one. And since garage doors are heavy, large, and a little difficult to install, most people who buy them also take advantage of these services. However, if you are the do-it-yourself type of person, you can just save your money and DIY your new garage door. Although you may find the task to be frightening at first, simply take your time and do the task step-by-step. Later on, you will find out that installing it yourself makes it a good weekend project after all. Okay, so how to do it? Here is an outline of garage door installation instructions to guide you on your DIY project.

First, you need get some precise measurements since these will help you determine the size of the door you need. Make sure that you jot down each measurement so that you will not forget them. Now, measure the height and width of the door opening. This will serve as your starting point for your figures. Next, you have to figure out your “side-room” which is the one from the side of your door to the garage wall, on the same side.

Take note that the vertical track for your standard torsion spring should at least be 3-3/4 from the side and 5-1/2 for your extension spring. After the “side-room”, proceed figuring out the “head-room”, the space from the door’s top up to the ceiling. In this case, you will need around 12 for the torsion spring and 10 for the extension spring. Now, if the headroom is really that limited and you need to install a garage door opener, and then be sure to use that special hardware designed mainly for that intention. Lastly, figure out the “back-room”, the space between the garage door openings all the way to the garage wall’s back. Add this up to whatever your door’s height is, plus another 18 inches.

After writing down all those measurements, now you can prepare the door opening for installation. First, have a frame of 2×6 wood jambs on the inside of the door opening; Make sure that the frame will match the headroom’s height that you measured earlier. Then, proceed to preparing the bottom section. Gather your hardware and then attach the weather stripping to this section, as much as possible do this on top of saw horses. Now to be precise, this is where you need to look at that manual since not all garage doors are the same. You have to inspect the instructions as to where the lift cable should be attached as well as the reinforcement strut and hinges. Remember this is just an outline. So, it is best to refer to your installation manual to know where you go from here.

So, what do you think? Is it still alarming to DIY your new garage door? This garage door installation guide is actually very easy to follow. All you need is time and patience. But to ensure that you get the best results out of this do-it-yourself project, make sure that you refer to the instruction manual provided for the specific brand of garage door you bought.