How To Shop For Garage Doors

Choose Style & Material

When choosing a garage door to complement your home, it helps if you have an idea of how you want your door styling to look. There are hundreds if not thousands of options when it comes to garage door designs. For inspiration, you can check out our Pinterest or our Gallery. We can also assist if you don’t know what you’re looking for. We even have a Design Center at 850 Mayfield Rd 101C Milton, GA 30009. We carry garage doors for Modern, Carriage House, Contemporary, Cape Cod, barndominiums, French Country, Colonial, Victorian, Tudor, Cottage, Craftsman, and Traditional homes.

If you have a hard time picking out garage doors to boost your curb appeal, don’t worry! We offer a service to help you. We have design consultants in-house that will look at your home’s architectural style and offer suggestions for the right garage door styling to match what you currently have. Schedule one of our design consultants to help.

Garage doors have come a long way! Only 20 years ago, you had just a few options. Now, there are so many garage door types that homeowners can be overwhelmed by them all, especially the custom design options. We’ve partnered with the best manufacturers to offer the best doors to complement your home and boost your curb appeal. The most common doors installed in the United States are steel garage doors. However, we’re probably best known for selling high-end doors like aluminum and glass garage doors, custom wood garage doors, and carriage house garage doors.

For wood garage doors, we offer a wide array of wood types, like cedar, mahogany, walnut, and hemlock. With wood garage doors, the options are endless when it comes to custom design. You can even add decorative hardware to boost the look of your custom garage doors even more. The detail and beauty of real wood doors cannot be duplicated, but there are wood-look garage doors that can get close. For example, the Clopay 5-layer Canyon Ridge is one of the best faux wood garage doors on the market.

You won’t save a lot of money when choosing this wood-look door over a real wood garage door, but there are some advantages. Wood doors are commonly considered high maintenance, but a high quality faux wood garage door doesn’t absorb moisture like wood. They’ve also gone to great lengths to make the Canyon Ridge look like real wood, giving you that authentic look. However, it’s our opinion that they aren’t as high maintenance as most people make them sound. The key is having them sealed after installation with Sikkens wood coating.

No matter your goals for a new garage door, we can assist by helping you choose the right look and material for your garage door. Check out just a few jobs we’ve done all over the Atlanta & North Georgia area.

Choose Your Garage Door Insulation & Construction

All garage door insulation is not the same. In fact, there are many different options for garage door insulation. Some garage doors are better insulated than others. For example, glass & aluminum doors aren’t historically energy efficient. Most insulated garage doors will range between 6 R-Value and 18 R-Value. When deciding what type of insulated garage door you want, you should consider that most of the walls in the garage aren’t insulated. Most builders only insulate the walls connected to the interior living space. You should also consider if there is a room above the garage. Uninsulated garage doors do nothing to protect your home from hot or cold weather. If you have a room above your garage where you struggle to maintain temperatures, your uninsulated garage door may be the reason.

Even more important than insulation is the construction of the garage door. There are three primary types of construction for garage doors. See the images below for visuals. The first two represent what we call “builder grade” and aren’t popular with our clients. These two options are 1-layer and 2-layer garage doors, also called “pan doors” and “vinyl back”. These doors are flimsy, cheap, and typically noisy.

There is another option called a three-layer that is extremely popular. We call it a three-layer because it has steel on the front, insulation in the middle, and steel on the back. The insulation also provides additional integrity. Some homeowners don’t care about insulation but love the idea of having a strong, safe, and durable garage door. The three-layer garage door meets those standards. When choosing a three-layer door you can choose from various options depending on the manufacturer. When researching these options, you’ll also find a difference in the thickness of the doors. For example, it’s popular for manufacturers to make a 1 3/8″ and a 2″ thick garage door. Both can be made with polystyrene and polyurethane. Polystyrene is best known as styrofoam and typically ranges in R-Value from 6 – 9.5.

Every garage door we offer can be insulated. We can even provide insulated full-view glass garage doors with urethane-injected frames and insulated glass, or we can provide insulated custom wood garage doors. No matter your desire, we can make it happen with high quality materials and attention to detail.

Hardware

As homeowners, it’s important that your door look great and last a long time. The hardware on the door will play a major role in the life of your garage door. It’s the most underrated and ignored part of your garage door. Garage door manufacturers tend to place builder-grade hardware with new garage doors as a way to cut corners. As a high quality garage door company, we don’t sell garage doors with cheap hardware. We upgrade our doors with upgraded hinges, rollers, and springs, and always add a full-length operator bracket. This is standard practice for us. We give you the best because we want your garage door to last a long time and always operate reliably.

DASMA (Door & Systems Manufacturers Association) has many standards in place for manufacturers including the requirement that all hardware installed with garage doors have a minimum cycle life of 10,000 cycles (A garage door cycle is when a garage door is raised and lowered). For the average homeowner in or around Atlanta GA, that is anywhere from 6 – 12 years with an average of around 8 – 10 years. Most commonly the spring will break around the end of that time.

If you have a worn-out or broken garage door spring, it’s important to move quickly because a garage door spring is your counterbalance system and does the heavy lifting. Without springs, your opener cannot lift the garage door. For new garage doors, we like to install what we call “high cycle” springs. These are springs 15,000 – 30,000 cycle springs. It’s not uncommon for manufacturers to include very cheap 18 gauge hinges, but we always attempt to upgrade them to 14 gauge. Because there are so many intricacies with garage doors and parts, it’s not advantageous for us to go into every detail because it becomes overwhelming to our clients. However, you can trust that we are focused on installing a garage door that is not only low maintenance but will also last a long time.

Garage Door Track

Many of our clients are unaware of the many options for garage door tracks. The track holds the door in place with the rollers. It’s not uncommon for homeowners to have a window that their garage door doesn’t clear or an entry door with a garage door that doesn’t clear. If you have high ceilings, we can take your garage door to the ceiling and then back. A few advantages to this would be opening your gate to your SUV without worrying that the gate will hit the door. We have a lot of car collectors do this for the installation of car lifts to stack cars. We offer low headroom, 10″ radius, 12″ radius, 15″ radius, 20″ radius, 32″ radius, and a high lift track. No matter the specific needs of your garage opening, we can make it work seamlessly with your new garage door.

Garage Door Sizes

There really isn’t a standard size when it comes to garage doors in the Atlanta market. However, there are some popular options. For single-car garage doors, you’ll find 8×7, 8×8, 9×7, 9×8, 10×7, and 10×8. For double doors, you’ll find 16×7, 16×8, 18×7, and 18×8. It’s also not uncommon for us to do tiny doors like golf cart doors. We even do a lot of countertop glass doors in basements and kitchens and those are commonly 5×4 or 6×4. Do you have a unique opening for a garage door? Give us a call so we can make it happen!

Powder Coating

Many of our clients are particular and want a nice, clean look inside and out. We have options to powder coat the track, hardware, and angle iron. This provides a very clean interior look and feel. The parts that can be powder coated include hinges, tracks, springs, torsion tube, and operator bracket. We can even powder-coat the inside of the garage door in any color on the RAL chart.

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