DIY garage door installation carries serious risks including security gaps, electrical hazards, and costly mistakes. Professional installation is nearly always the safer, more cost-effective choice, since most suppliers include fitting in the price and bring the skill and experience to get it right first time.
There is a lot to be said for doing a bit of DIY. You may have a knack for it. You may pride yourself on not reaching for the phone every time something needs doing around the house. But have you ever bitten off more than you can chew? Have you ever come unstuck doing something that seemed simple at first glance but proved far more difficult as you got further into it?
Sometimes things escalate, and what started as an easy job slides from slightly puzzling to plain old disastrous. You can find yourself staring at a mess, wondering how it got there.
DIY garage door installation is a case in point. Your existing door was almost certainly installed by a professional, because it’s not the sort of thing most people pick up at the hardware store and fit themselves. Anyone who has ever installed a garage door successfully was either properly trained beforehand or had learned the hard way through earlier mistakes.
Anatomy of a Garage Door
There’s a well-known school of DIY that says: if you’re replacing a unit, just note how the old one was fitted and do the new one the same way. That works fine if the new unit is identical to the old one, but in reality, it usually isn’t.
With a DIY garage door installation, you’ll be dealing with parts like the barrel, full box, security straps, motor, motor plate, head plate, and tube end. Some suppliers provide tutorials and installation guides on their websites, but even so, you’ll be doing this for the first time. Practice makes perfect, and you haven’t had any.
If you’re a self-assembly enthusiast who has built flat-pack furniture from cryptic diagrams, this might sound like just another challenge. But the difference here is that without the properly assembled unit, you have a hole in the wall of your home. That means security issues and temperature issues. Getting it wrong could be not just embarrassing but costly, and potentially dangerous, because electricity is involved.
Is There a Reason to Try to Install a Garage Door Yourself?
In a nutshell, no. Garage door installation and repair requires skill, and even before the installation begins, garage doors need to be properly understood. Those times when you assembled flat-pack furniture and had a few spare screws but the thing held together anyway: this is not one of those situations. Get a garage door wrong and it will be worse than useless. Damage something in the process and you may end up needing to buy new doors entirely.
Get yourself a quote for a quality door with installation built into the price, and then let the professionals handle it. Just sit back and appreciate how good a skilled tradie can be, because when it comes to garage doors, they really can be brilliant.
Looking for reliable installation on the Central Coast? Greg James Garage Doors handles supply and fitting together, so there’s no guesswork involved.