residential

  • 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.

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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.

  • Your Garage’s Curb Appeal

    Whenever you consider making a large change to your home, it is a good idea to keep resale value in mind. Unless you plan on owning your home for the rest of your life, you will need to put it back on the market at some point. If you make undesirable changes to your home in order to make it more appropriate for your living situation, you might find yourself regretting the choice when your house languishes, unsold, for months. Many homeowners wonder if converting their garage to a living space would give them a leg up against the competition, and others don’t know if they can expect to recoup the cost of a new garage door when they sell. We’ve done the research and can pass our findings on to you, so that you can be an informed consumer.

  • Garage Door Origins

    The origins of the garage door are difficult to trace. If you consider early chariot gatehouses to be garages, then the earliest doors date to around 450 BC. These early doors were used to shelter chariots when they weren’t being used in sport or war, and functioned very similarly to barn doors. Romans used their chariots for carrying archers around the battlefield and to transport their leaders, and perhaps more often for sports like hunting and racing. The invention of the spoked wheel made chariots possible as early as 2000 BC, and chariot races were still popular through the 6th century.

  • 13 Garage Doors Myths, Debunked

    People say things that aren’t true all of the time. Sometimes, they don’t know better. Sometimes, they’re trying to sell you things that you don’t really need. This sort of misinformation has led to a bunch of rumors and myths about garage doors that aren’t true. Today, we’ll dispel 13 of the most common myths so that you can have the right answers to these important questions. Feel free to check these for yourself if you don’t believe us, but we’d much rather educate a customer than charge someone for services or upgrades they don’t need.