I give thanks for new garage doors

Yay! Here is the before, as it looked after the hail storm:

So you can see that this is one of the old fashioned sliding doors. You can probably also see that the rod/track is bent and rusty. I've been unable to move the door by myself for a while now. For one, the door dips down in that bent part and starts to drag on the ground; it's too heavy for me to lift up and move along. Also, there are places where the bolts holding the track up have rusted and/or rotted out of the building. The wheels on the door then snag on the loosened brackets. If I got a running start, sometimes I could get past these two hiccups, but usually one of the wheels fell off the track altogether and caused a whole other host of problems.

Recently, the track gave way completely and the door was pretty precariously leaning on the frame. The final straw was a windstorm that blew the door down and onto the car parked in front of it.

The hailstorm insurance settlement included money to repair this door-- reset the track and replace most of the wood. We decided a new door system was a better use of the money. The end result:


Tada! Obviously still needs to be painted, hence the candy stripe effect. It just seemed such a waste to buy all new wood when at least a portion of what was there was perfectly good. We broke down the big sliding door and salvaged about a dozen of the most intact of the 1X5 tounge and groove boards. Then we ran them through the table saw to take off the tongue and chopped off the ends. Then we alternated them with 1X4s on a frame of 2X4s. Added a few 2X4 bracings for the hinges and slapped those puppies up.


It took many, many trips to the hardware store, which officially makes it a project in my opinion. We still need to add diagonal support cables to the inside to reduce the inevitable sagging, and some scraping and painting will top it off. But it made me seriously so happy.

We also had the heater looked at on Wednesday...the guy who came couldn't find the smell, but suggested that the hallway where the return vent is located might be creating a negative pressure situation and sucking air up through the patched floor furnace hole. The vapor barrier under there is pretty ragged and not really working well anymore. Add that to the list.

And then we cooked and cleaned for Thanksgiving. It was a great excuse to get the house cleaned up and usable and a really great excuse to have a whole lotta leftovers for a very long time.

All in all, a great use of 5 days off in a row.

(I should add a disclaimer here that, while the kiddo and I did most of the cooking and cleaning, Adam did most of the work on the doors. I did a lot of holding, going to the hardware store, replacing spent batteries with charged ones, catching boards on the other side of the table saw, and helpfully pointing out when we were screwing things into the wrong end. Adam deserves most of the credit on this one.)