Garage Doors for Your Home - 11/1/2003 - Home Exterior Garage Driveway
Garage Doors for Your Home
Selecting the right garage doors for your home is an important consideration. On this page I will cover what I considered important when selecting doors for our garages when we built our home.
The first thing you should consider when selecting the right doors for your garage is the local building code. When we built our first home in Florida the local code required wind load specifications that the garage doors had to meet or exceed. You can call your local building department or visit your local building supply and they will have a good selection of doors that meet the local specifications.
After making certain you have met or exceeded the local building codes you can consider the other important aspects below:
What are the dimensions of your Garage Doors? Of course you should consider your garage dimensions including the openings when you are selecting and modifying your House Plans, but I feel it is important to mention selecting the proper height and width of your doors. If you have a large SUV, Pickup Truck or boat you will need a 9 foot door height to clear the top of the vehicle. My Brother ran into this problem when he wanted to buy a Ford Expedition and it would not fit in his 8 foot standard Garage Door.
When we built our garages we made sure the doors were 9 foot tall to accommodate whatever vehicle we bought in the future. The one thing I do regret is not making the garages deeper. Our plans called for the garages to be 22 feet deep, and I wish I had made them at least 25. This would have involved another beam that would have cost 1500 dollars so I opted to save the money.
What design do want for your doors? Of course this is up to your personal taste, but you need to spend some time considering colors, windows in the doors etc.. A great place to do this is on the Clopay website. We are not associated with Clopay in any way and don't receive anything for an endorsement. I think they make a great product and have used them on two of our houses.
Another important consideration that is part of design is the color of the garage doors. I picked a color directly from the factory that looked good on our house. This allowed us to put the doors up and not have to paint them. This saved us time and money!
A final consideration that I would like to mention is insulating your Garage Doors. If your garage is attached to your home it is a great idea to pay the extra cost to add insulation to the back of the doors. This adds an extra buffer from the hot and cold, and helps keep your power bills down.
If your are buying high wind load doors they will offer more insulation value because of the backer board on the doors. For a small fee you can add insulation and increase your energy efficiency even more.
On a final note it is a good idea to consider an installation contractor to install your doors. I hired a pro to put up our doors and he was here and gone before I knew it. There are a million screws, nuts, nuts bolts and tracks to assemble and it would have taken me a week. You can find out more about selecting a good Contractor on the Building Contractor page.
