A garage door is a simple machine that can hurt you

What we do

Repairs and installation, residential

Torsion springs, cables, drums, rollers, track, hinges, openers, bottom seals, and full door replacement. That is the whole list. We are not a general handyman service that also does garage doors, and we do not take commercial rolling-steel or dock work.

The narrowness is deliberate. Most of what stops a garage door is one of six parts, and the difference between a good visit and a bad one is whether the person diagnosing it has seen that failure a hundred times.

Two kinds of garage

The suburbs and the city are different jobs

An attached three-car in Hoffman Estates and a detached brick garage off a Portage Park alley are not the same work. The attached one is part of the heated house, usually has living space above it, and the conversation is about insulation values and opener noise. The alley garage is unheated, takes weather on both faces, often sits on an opening that has gone out of square over fifty years, and sometimes has no power at all.

Companies that only ever work one of those two tend to quote the other wrong. We price them differently because they are different.

On the truck

The common failures are a single visit

Matched torsion spring pairs, lift cables, drums, sealed-bearing rollers, hinges, opener drive gears, safety sensors and bottom seal travel with the technician. That is what turns a broken spring into one appointment rather than a diagnosis followed by a parts run and a second morning off work.

• Springs replaced in matched pairs, cycle-rated to the door
• Cables replaced in pairs so the door stays square
• The door rebalanced by hand before the opener is reconnected
• Opener force and travel limits reset, and the safety reverse tested

How we work

Diagnose first, quote second, then work

1. Disconnect the opener and test the door by hand. A balanced door holds at the halfway point on its own. That single test separates a spring problem from an opener problem, and it is where most misdiagnosis happens.
2. Say what failed and what it costs, before starting. If something else broke when the first thing went, you hear that then rather than on the invoice.
3. Repair with parts already on the truck wherever the failure is a common one.
4. Rebalance, reset the opener limits, and test the safety reverse before leaving. Every visit.

We publish price bands rather than running everything through a free estimate. It costs us the ability to price a job by how worried you sound, which seems like a fair trade.

Credentials

Licence and insurance