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Friday, October 3, 2014

New Garage Doors

I never thought I would be so excited over a pair of overhead garage doors. Our old wood garage doors which came with the house were falling apart. Cracks after cracks they were beyond repair, and quickly becoming an embarrassment. Our builder used the most basic wood panel doors: they should have been treated and painted at factory but I suspect they were painted on the construction site instead. And they were probably lying around for a while. By then the moisture would have got into the wood and the rest was history. 


Our old cracked wood garage doors. We tried patching up using adhesive caulking then painting over but as you could see, it did very little to slow down the inevitable.


I suppose I could have left them alone for another few years until we move but you know I am not that kind of person. My OCD got the worst of me so last month I brought in a friend's husband John who is a garage door expert to replace them. 

Our new garage doors are from C.H.I Carriage House collection, model #5983


I knew I wanted a certain carriage house style, but I had no idea about other tech specs: insulated or not; insulated with Polystyrene or Polyurethane; how high do we need to go on the R-value; steel, aluminum or fibreglass? John inspected our existing garage doors and recommended the model based on our needs.  I picked out a style from the brochure (because that's all I knew :)), and he was able to have that style made with all the features from model #5983 - he made this whole thing too easy! 

That's not all. On the day of the installation, he arrived on time and got to work. He replaced all the rails inside our garage and even re-aligned a crooked support beam. A few hours later these beauties were hung. Our new garage doors are now rock solid and most importantly weather-proof with 27-gauge deep-draw quality steel inside out, and CFC free polystyrene insulation. We also have real (tinted) glass inserts this time so it is now so much brighter inside our garage. 

The colour of our garage doors is Sandstone. Another thing I love about our new C.H.I. garage doors is the customer service from this company. I needed to paint the trims to match the new garage doors so I emailed C.H.I. and they replied overnight with a set of custom paint codes I could take to Sherwin Williams. The store I went to however wasn't able to pull up the combination because it's a commercial custom colour in the States. I called C.H.I. customer service hotline from the paint store, and a real human picked up the phone after two rings; within seconds I was transferred to a service agent who offered to ship a quart of paint to John. I didn't want to wait that long so I asked the paint store associate to try to match the colour. It was a very challenging task for Sherwin Williams because the paint chip is a piece of textured steel, but the associate was able to get a perfect match after multiple attempts. So if you have C.H.I. garage doors in Sandstone, and would like a paint colour match please email me for the codes. 


I am glad I went with the wrought iron decorative hardware John recommended because all other options (spade, Barcelona 1 &2 ) are just thin pieces of metals which look cheap. 


If you are interested in C.H.I. garage doors and would like to get in touch with John, please email me. I highly recommend his work!