Garage door question.

[foryorent]

Hello everyone,

I recently moved into a new home and have a 2 and 1/2 car garage. The door is just a standard 2 car garage door. I am hoping to put a storage/maintenance lift in the garage, but the height of the garage door when it is open (i.e. up) is a bit lower than I would need to be able to store a car on the lift and be able to open the garage door. Currently the height from the floor to the bottom of the door when open is 7 and 1/2 feet. I need to be able to make this useable height 9 feet.

Is it possible to insert a 1.5 or 2 foot section of track into the garage door track? Thus increasing the height of the point at which the garage door starts to fold horizontally. The spring or coil setup would have to be move up in relation to the new "folding" point I would think.

Has any one done this before? The only issue that I see is how the garage door opener would work as I believe that doing this would put the opener about 1.5 or 2 feet above the level of the garage door when it is closed. Can’t remember how the opener attaches to the garage door.

Anyone want to take a guess as to how much this might cost me?

[derekf]

Hi, welcome to the site.

I'd probably call around to a couple of local garage door places and see what they thought; they may do free estimates anyway.

[ALLFAITH]

I had a custom garage track made using my existing door-the added another panel to the top of the door and it pulls the door close to ceiling. I even used my same garage door opener, b/c the garage person talked me out of palcing one on the wall like a commerical lift-he claimed it was illegal in residential-not so sure of that.

No lift added yet, but it will definitely work as I have 11 foot plus ceilings.

I can try to figure out how to send pics. Shop around as I got a few different prices and ideas.

Brad

[foryorent]

thanks for the replies! So it sounds like it can be done. I was figuring it would be tough to do without buying a new garage door, but it sounds like you can just add to your existing garage door.

ALLFAITH, can I ask how much you ended up paying for this?

[ALLFAITH]

about 1000.00

[JMarsa]

They commonly install track two ways to get the doors closer to the ceiling. I have one of each. The first is where the end of the track angles towards the ceiling. The other is a double track set-up where the top of the door rides one set of track and the botton rides the other. This allows the door to "Kick-up" through the transition faster and uses less overhead space.

I knew of neither option before the door guys came out to measure. They added minimal expense to the total cost.

--JMarsa