doors

  • 3 More Garage Band Success Stories!

    There isn’t always an easy solution to a loud home. With children, television, and the rumbles or beeps that come with any appliance, finding peace and quiet in your home can be difficult. Many of these noises are unavoidable, but sometimes the secret is fairly simple. Loud hobbies or guitar practice are typically sent to the one room in the house where noises can be separated from the rest of your living space – the garage. This tradition, practiced by hobbyist woodworkers and middle-school bandmates alike has given rise to many of the greatest bands of all time. Last Monday, we looked at four chart toppers that begun playing together in the garage – The Who, Nirvana, Ramones, and The Kinks. Today, we’re going to continue the trend by talking about the origins of The Runaways, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and The Yardbirds. These three classic artists begun playing together in the garage, and from there successfully moved into performing packed amphitheaters around the world.

  • DIY: Adding Weatherstripping to Your Garage Door

    If you read our previous blog post about R-Value, you probably know that insulating your garage is an important step in keeping your utility bills down and making your garage a pleasant room to be in during the heat of summer or the cold of winter. But if you’re not interested in upgrading to a better insulated garage door, your next best bet might be adding weatherstripping (also called astragal) around your door. We’ll walk you through this simple DIY procedure for sealing the top, sides, and bottom of your door, all of which can be done on a tiny budget.

  • How to: Manually Operate Your Garage Door

    With the recent storms in and around Charlotte, as well as the tropical storm headed for Florida, it is reasonable for our readers to be concerned about their house’s power. If your home loses power, your garage door opener will also run out of juice, and you might be unable to get your cars out of your garage! If your door is properly maintained, you should be able to open it manually, and we’ll explain how to do so in this article.

  • Garage Band Startups

    Garage bands are notorious. Anytime that a child wants to explore music or an adult wants to try a new hobby, they inevitably need a space to make noise. So many middle-school bands have been sentenced to the garage by moms tired of listening to their racket that music made in the garage – garage rock – has long been an accepted genre of music. There is something inimitable about the freedom that musicians can find in the garage, sequestered just far enough away from the house that everyone else can still get some sleep during late-night practices. This bootstrapping process is respected, even coveted, among musicians tired of the heavily produced and styled modern ultra-stars that dominate pop music. Names like “The Who” and “Nirvana” are cited as inspirations and critical thought leaders among the next generation of garage bands.

  • Has Lightning Damaged your Garage Door Opener?

    Have the recent summer storms around Charlotte been raining on your parade? Not only have we been experiencing severe storms and torrential rainfall, but of course these storms are accompanied by thunder and lightning. Lightning in particular can be dangerous, to people and possessions. Many families know to unplug their valuable electronics from the wall outlets or to use surge protectors, in order to protect these appliances and computers, but your garage door opener is also at risk. If you’ve been experiencing strange problems from your opener, a lightning strike may be the cause. We’re experts in garage door repair and we’ve collected a list of ways to identify if your garage door opener may have been damaged by a power surge, so read on to see if this applies to you!

  • Your Home’s Secret Energy Cost!

    Can you imagine life without a garage door opener? Your parents or grandparents lived without them for years, of course, but the modern convenience of pulling up your driveway and seeing the door already opening is a welcome sight. The concept of having to park your car in front of the door, get out into the heat or rain, and manually lift the door isn’t just annoying, it is also a huge safety risk. Your garage door opener is responsible for holding the door closed until your specially coded remote opens it. What you probably don’t know about your opener is that it might be costing you hundreds of dollars a year.

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    Death by DIY: Electricity!

    Have you ever tried to do a home improvement job yourself to save some cash? Of course you have! Most homeowners have a little D-I-Y spirit in them and tackling a problem yourself can be convenient and quick. With the rise of Youtube’s How To videos and Pintrest’s step-by-step guides, you can usually find some help for whatever needs doing just by looking around online. There are a couple of areas, however, that no homeowner should try to DIY.

  • How to Upgrade your Garage Door: Painting it!

    Is your garage door a white rectangle? Most doors are, and although there’s nothing wrong with a simple solution, some homes simply don’t look as good with a white door. Maybe your home’s exterior is better suited for a wooden door, or a door colored in a less traditional tone. Some homes can match the styling of their door’s glass windows to the styling of their entry door or nearby exterior windows. Some homeowners choose to make their door pop by painting it red, blue, green, or painting it with a bold pattern. Even just changing the hardware on your door’s exterior to emulate a carriage house door. Basically, if you’ve got an older door or a plain door, you might be missing out on one of the best ways to express your personality on the outside of your house!

  • The HP Garage

    The Hewlett-Packard Company, usually called HP, is one of the largest information technology companies in the world. They produce a variety of hardware components and software that are used all around the world. HP employs over 300,000 employees and earned more than 110 billion dollars of revenue in 2014. Needless to say, HP is a big deal in the world of electronics, but the company has one high honor that has nothing to do with their commercial success; the garage in which HP first operated has been named “the birthplace of Silicone Valley” and added it to the list of California Historical Landmarks. Hewlett-Packard started in a garage, and for over seventy-five years since then they have been one of the preeminent names in information technology.

  • 25 Ways to Childproof your Garage

    You might think of your garage as a messy storage room, but anyone who has ever had a child knows that kids see something very different. To a child, a garage is an enchanting land of forbidden toys, tasty liquids and fun machinery. Keeping kids out of the garage is the best way to protect them from it, but once your child gets to the age that they can open doors, you can’t be expected to watch them 24/7. We’ve collected 25 tips to child-proof your garage. Spending a couple hours making your garage a safer place for your son or daughter to play is well worth the time when you consider the risk of a child getting hurt, and most of these tips can be done on a small budget or no budget at all.

  • Dinosaur Door

    The garage door is typically thought of as one of the noisiest parts of your home, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Although many garage doors are poorly maintained and therefore end up being rather loud, if noise is a concern then there are a number of simple steps you can take to reduce the amount of noise that operating your door makes. Some of these steps might place you at risk, so we recommend only having an expert perform this maintenance, but some of the simpler steps can be safely performed by homeowners. If your garage door sounds like a dinosaur, like in the video attached, frankly that is awesome and we don’t suggest changing it. But if your door is a boring sort of loud, these simple steps can help reduce the noise and keep you sane.

  • Primed for Success

    Amazon.com is the largest Internet-based retail company in the United States, and the 6th-most-visited website in the world, but it hasn’t gotten to that lofty position without some growing pains. Amazon in one of the newest companies we’ll be covering in Garage Greatness, since they made their first sale in 1995, a mere twenty years ago. In those twenty years, Jeff Bezos, the manically-driven mastermind behind Amazon’s record-shattering success, has moved his business from a garage-based bookseller to a household name and competitor in nearly every industry and country around the globe. At the beginning, however, it began in a garage.