Spring is here, and that means one thing. Home repair. Our first project is to build some new garage doors. We were wanting to start with building a pergola on the back porch, but the garage doors were on their last leg/hinge, literally.
When we bought the house we knew there was some water damage on the outside wall, but it wasn't apparent how bad it was until I took the drywall off. Most of the wall crumbled in my hands... no pry-bar or hammer was needed to take it down, and half the wood crumbed into such small pieces I swept it into garbage bags. It would have made some great mulch. This was really scary considering I have done a fair amount of walking around on the garage roof. The front corner of the garage was being held up by one stud. I didn't realize until this point why the lower corner of the stucco was cracked and bent outward, but it was due to the roof sinking. So what was supposed to be a "build new doors" project, ended up being a "re-frame half the garage" project. Now, you might be asking, why wouldn't I just buy a sweet new automatic garage door? Well, look at the slop of the roof in the pictures below. It's impossible to get a normal garage door installed, so I'm just building barn door style doors that will hopefully last a few years until we have money to rebuild the garage the correct way. The idiots before me didn't see the need to seal the frame with silicone or add flashing above the trim, thus the frame holding the doors was falling apart.
You can see the rotting wood.
Apparently the previous owner knew about the rotting wood, but decided to try to stop it in it's tracks with some metal support bars!
The new framing, which admittedly has a couple of not plum studs.
The new door framing, which is now square to the ground and not following the slop of the roof.
One of the new doors, and the corner where the cracked/bent stucco was cut away.
Posted on: Monday, April 20, 2009
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