Old House Handyman: Garage door project opens a portal to the past
The overhead door on the one-car garage behind my daughter’s house on the family farm epitomizes the skinflint gene I inherited from my dad and grandpa.
First, the garage is recycled. It had humble beginnings decades ago as the weigh station for a nearby, small-time, coal mining business. When the mine operator abandoned the simple wooden structure, my grandpa dragged it to the farm.
It was supposed to serve as a garage for the house he and my great-grandpa built from lumber they salvaged during the Great Depression — lumber from the one-room schoolhouse my grandpa and his brother attended in the early 1900s. It’s hard to imagine how it must have felt to personally raze your elementary school and build a house from its parts.
But I digress. The wooden garage with a tin roof, which I’d estimate is now about 70 years old, has been shelter to everything from vehicles to farm wagons to, well, mice and junk. Over the years, we’ve painted and patched it.
I painted its bright red roof once a few years ago and the siding last year. Other family members painted it before me. The roof will last forever if we keep painting it to keep the rust at bay.
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I’m not so sure about the siding. Woodpeckers routinely knock holes in its aging pine. Our daughter found a downy woodpecker flapping around inside the garage a couple of weeks ago. It drilled the hole to get in but apparently was so panicked at the sight of what must have seemed like the largest birdhouse on the planet that it couldn’t find its own hole to get out.
Our daughter managed to lift the crumbling overhead door enough to let it out.
And that door was our latest project. It was the second overhead door on the building that I’m aware of. The first one, made of wood, rotted away. We kept it painted, but that was not enough to protect it from the brutal weather that sweeps across the hilltop site where my ancestors put down roots more than 200 years ago.
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My stepdad gave us a used garage door to replace it more than a decade ago. I spent a day or so installing it, and it did a fine job for many years. Then, when it started to show signs of failure, Dad took action by patching the decaying wood with sheets of metal and wood filler.
It was a valiant effort, and it looked great. If it had been a vehicle, my high school buddies would have called it a 50-50 car. It looks great at 50 yards going 50 miles an hour.
But it couldn’t withstand the beastly winds, rain and snow on that hilltop.
A few months ago, our daughter lifted the door and the frame holding the windows in place started to give way. Sheets of glass began to slide toward her, and she quickly maneuvered herself and the door so that she saved herself and the glass.
The door, however, was finished.
We did some half-hearted searching online for used garage doors with no luck. We didn’t want to buy a new one because we’re thrifty — and we’re planning to replace the building with a new, larger garage and shop in the near future. We just needed a door to keep out that darned winter weather.
So when we went to Yoder’s Hardware Store in Walnut Creek for one of our frequent visits, I asked owner Sam Yoder if he knew of anyone who might sell used garage doors.
He looked a little perplexed, as if to wonder how I could have known that he just took down three garage doors from the shop he is remodeling.
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“How many do you need?” he asked.
“Just one,” I said.
“You can have it.”
That was about 10 a.m. last Saturday. By late afternoon, the old garage had a new (to us) weathertight door.
It cost us the better part of a day — time well-spent by Dad and daughter talking about the history of the old garage, her grandpa and great-grandpa, and passing along the skinflint gene.
Alan D. Miller is a Dispatch editor who writes about old-house repair and historic preservation.
amiller@dispatch.com
@youroldhouse
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Replacing garage door a good time to share stories from past
