New Garage Doors and Garage Door Installation Services

Garage doors are available in a variety of sizes, and one of the first things you will normally be asked when shopping for a new door is whether or not you need a single or a double garage door and what size of door you need. Will you need two single doors, a double door, or a combination of a single and a double for a three-car garage? How many vehicles are you going to park inside the garage, and how big are they? If you are replacing your door, do not assume it is a standard size because there are many exceptions. You will need to measure your existing door to be sure, but here are some standard sizes to give you a basic reference.

For a normal home with a normal car, truck, SUV or van parked inside, a standard residential garage door measures either 8 x 7 feet, 9 x 7 feet or 10 x 7 feet.

Height: Garage door heights are typically seven or eight feet tall. Older houses might have shorter doors because most people just had cars back then and not SUVs and vans with additional racks and carriers attached and oversized trucks with mirrors that extend out.

Width: Eight or nine feet is the most common. On older homes, single doors tend to be eight feet wide, but nowadays, with the oversized vehicles, ten foot wide single doors are getting to be more common. If you need a double door, you would double the width. A double garage door measures out to 12 x 7 feet, 14 x 7 feet and 16 x 7 feet. This is designed for more than one vehicle and for bigger vehicles to fit inside your garage as well. The standard garage doors are sixteen to eighteen feet wide and some are as wide as twenty feet.

Most of our doors can be ordered with different levels of insulation to help keep your garage and home warm in the winter months and cool in the summer months. If you have an attached garage, that can translate into hundreds of dollars in energy savings. On the insulation, you’ll need to know that it affects two things, the sturdiness of the door and the temperature inside the garage.

Sturdiness: A non-insulated door typically has a steel front with a hollowed interior while the insulated door has an additional interior steel layer with insulation in between the layers, which makes the insulated door sturdier than its non-insulated counterpart. You can choose from varying degrees of insulation depending on manufacturer and model, and if you live in a coastal area that has hurricanes, you can also choose a hurricane door that has additional hardware to make them more wind resistant.

Temperature: We normally see insulated doors in homes with insulated garage walls, which all together levels out the temperature in the garage. They help keep your garage and home warm in the winter months and cool in the summer months, and if you have an attached garage, that can translate into hundreds of dollars in energy savings.

The next step in purchasing a new garage door is to determine the best style of door for your home. You will want to choose a style that blends with your home’s architecture.

Material of Door
Starting with the material, choose a material that will work best in your climate. Depending on your location, you will need to select metal, fiberglass, wood or aluminum for your door. Relatively inexpensive yet tough, steel garage doors are considered to be the standard on most new homes and come in a variety of styles from plain to elegant.

Type of Door
Depending on your lifestyle and the use of the door will determine which type you should invest in. They all basically boil down to two main types, the traditional style and the carriage style.

Traditional Raised Panel

Steel raised-panel garage doors are the most common garage doors in America. Sturdy and reliable, they have a timeless design with eight raised square panels usually and a deep wood grain texture; and they come in a variety of designs, colors, and window options. The traditional style is more economical and requires less maintenance than its counterpart, the carriage style.

Carriage Style

The carriage style is a more elegant style that is steel imprinted to resemble the old carriage house doors that would swing or slide open to let the owner’s carriage in or out. This style combines the elegant carriage house look with durable steel construction and overhead technology and usually has a deeper wood grain texture than the traditional styled door. It has the mechanics of a standard garage door, but it looks like it will open outward with faux hinges and hardware. Customize your design by choosing from a large selection of color, window style and decorative hardware options.

Color of Door
When deciding on the color of garage door that will best enhance the curb appeal of your home, you will want to select a color theme that includes the color of the window trim and exterior siding, whether it be brick, stucco, vinyl or wood. A nice color theme can really make a difference in how well your house stands out in the neighborhood and how it’s valued in the real estate market. Here are some things to keep in mind when choosing your colors. If your home is a neutral color, a white door and trim could give it a cleaner and brighter appearance, and if your home is white, adding some color could brighten it up. Either way, the idea is to create contrast, unless you want to tone the appearance of your home down by matching the color of the door to the color of your house. Garage doors come in a variety of colors and finishes with the most common colors being white, light or dark sand, stone, brown, charcoal, black, blue and green. With traditional-style doors, you normally will also have the option of wood-grain finishes, while on a contemporary style, the option could be anodized aluminum.

Windows or Solid?
Windows are a nice addition to the door’s design. They add another layer of design to the door; they let the sunlight into the garage, and they allow you to see out. You’ll want to keep in mind though that the light coming into the garage will bring additional heat with it as well, which can make it pretty hot in the garage during the summer. Windows will also allow heat to escape in the winter, making it colder on the inside than a garage with no windows in the door. Additionally, as you are able to look out, someone on the outside will be able to look in, unless you go with a design that doesn’t allow that. You can either have plain glass squares or you can decorate them with various decorative inserts that fit on top of the glass and can be painted to match the color of your garage door. Here are some of the different window insert designs from which to choose.

Once you’ve chosen the style of your door, you’ll then want to select the best brand for your budget. As you can imagine, there are many garage door manufacturers out there so you’ll want to choose one that is reputable. With O’Brien Garage Doors you are not locked in to any one brand of garage door but rather you can choose from a number of top manufacturers, and you can rest assured that they are all high quality and reputable manufacturers because that is all we carry. We would be happy to help determine your garage door requirements and then review with you the different styles of products each brand has to offer and the various options you’ll have with them to fit your garage door needs. Top garage door manufacturers include Amarr, C.H.I., doorLink, and MidAmerica. You’ll find on our Garage Door Manufacturers page the different brands we carry along with links to their sites where you can view their photo galleries of garage doors.

Last but not least, just as you do with the front and back doors to your home, you will also want to ensure the security of your garage door. There are a few basic security features to consider. We will add these on our next update.