Finally... headway on a project that's been in the works for a number of years: New garage doors!
The old doors were original to the house, tilt up style with plywood surfacing and tacked-on wood trim, all painted white most recently:
These existing doors were structurally sound, but the exterior was definitely shot, both openers were old and not functional, and all but one spring was broken. They haven't opened via remote since we've owned the house! Installation bids we got confirmed that the steel hinge hardware would also need to be replaced. We priced out custom mahogany garage doors many years ago to match the rest of the woodwork on the house, but at $6500 / door, this just wasn't going to happen. We also looked at more conventional home depot roll-up door options, and at about $1000 per door installed with opener they were definitely more financially feasible. But vinyl doors weren't going to match all the custom craftsman wood on the house / studio facades.
So we decided to build them ourselves. I modeled up the final design in Maya, this version with potential 'craftsman' stained glass design:
Some extra internal framing would be needed to accommodate the new window openings in the design, but I definitely wanted more natural light in the garage. The extra mahogany wood detailing with the additional structural elements would mean double springs on each side along with some opener upgrades.
We pulled the doors out, stripped off the old surfacing and sanded down the frames.
The framing around the doors needed to be replaced before the new doors could be put in. Ripping out the side framing elements revealed some unfortunate and quite severe termite damage that had to be addressed:
Johnny assembled the final doors while I was in Florence. Total cost for wood was around $1200 for both doors, all mahogany plywood and clear top-grade half inch mahogany stock for the detailing / trim.
We started pricing out the glass for the stained glass window inserts, but for now it's prohibitively expensive. In the interim we purchased some translucent plex to seal things off. Final doors awaiting a coat of sealant and final windows:
The old doors finally got demolished, all of the old surface plywood, framing members and hardware cut up and neatly fit into just two trash bins:
