Stocked Parts
We carry common modern sizes on the truck - standard 8-, 9-, and 16-foot door widths with matching track and torsion hardware. That covers most Orinda jobs without a special order. Where it doesn't: some original 1961-era openings run narrower or shorter than today's standard sizes, and a few garages built before modern code have headroom that won't take a standard torsion setup without adjustment. On those, we're ordering a size or a low-headroom kit rather than pulling it off the shelf, and that adds time to the job. We'll tell you up front if your opening is one of those - it's usually obvious once we've got the tape on it.
How Long You Are Without the Door
A straight swap, where the new door matches the old opening and the track mounts to sound framing, is a same-day job start to finish. Your garage sits open for the hours we're working, not overnight. It runs longer when the opening doesn't match a stocked size and we're waiting on a special order - in that case the old door usually stays in place, even if it's on its last legs, until the new one arrives, rather than leaving the bay open for days. We'd rather tell you that before we start than have you find out when the crew leaves and the door isn't back on.
Where This Job Goes Sideways
The surprise on a house this age is almost never the door - it's what's behind it. Pull an original frame off a 1961 garage and you sometimes find a header that's been carrying load longer than it was rated for, or jamb wood that's gone soft where it's been in contact with concrete for decades. We won't mount new track hardware to a jamb that won't hold screws. That means some jobs turn into a frame repair before the door goes in, which isn't something we can quote accurately until the old door's off the wall. It's not common, but on houses this old it's not rare either, and it's the one thing that can turn a one-day install into two.
