5 Cheap Garage Door Fixes Before It Gets Cold

There is one room in your house that never gets warm. Everybody in the family knows which one it is, and if it sits over the garage or backs onto it, you have spent years blaming the furnace. It is not the furnace. I spent forty years as head custodian at one public school. That building had two overhead doors and a delivery truck sat in one of them, door up, for twenty minutes every Tuesday all winter. You stop guessing where the heat goes when you heat a room with a hole in it for forty years. Here is what is in this one. Why your bottom rubber is the only part anybody ever replaces, and why pulling the old one out stops dead about a foot in. It slides in a track and the track fights you a little harder with every inch. The three edges nobody touches. The bottom is one side of four, and the other three together are three times as long. Then the one thing that decides whether the new ones work at all, which is that you nail them on with the door already shut, not open. Why a rattling door wastes the money you just spent on rubber, and what twenty dollars of nylon does about it. Also the one bracket on that door I want you to leave completely alone, and why. The repair I did three times in four years before I picked up a tape measure. The rubber was never the problem. The trim was nailed on crooked in the sixties and no seal on earth was going to bridge that. And the last one, which is not on the garage door at all. Your garage was never inside the heated part of your house. The real edge of your house is the wall behind it, the ceiling over it, and a plain door into your kitchen that has probably never had a scrap of weatherstrip on it. Twelve dollars fixes that one. Nothing here needs a garage door company. One thing on this list does, and I will tell you plainly which one. #HomeMaintenance #GarageDoor #WinterPrep