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Garage Door Alternatives

Why do you need a garage door? There are a number of reasons why garage doors are so popular, but when it comes to their alternatives you never really see them. This is because garage doors are such an integral part of many of our daily lives’ that we just are unable to live without them. This means that whenever something happens to your garage door you really have no choice but to get the garage door repaired. When you have a broken garage door there are however a few things that you may think of as reasonable alternative before you get your mind straight. Garage door repairs aren’t extremely expensive, but any unforeseen expense can send a tight budget into a spiral and you might be thinking that by putting off the cost or coming up with an easy alternative to fixing your garage door you will be able to send the bill down the line or avoid it all together. This of course is false, but you don’t need to trust me just yet. In this article we will look at some of the alternatives. We will look at the things that the average home owner might think of as possibilities to paying a garage door repair service to come out and fix whatever broken part or piece there is to be repaired.


The first way to put off fixing a broken or old garage door is to just ignore it. Keep using the garage door like you would if it was working properly and hope that things will just work themselves out. This works for pretty much no piece of machinery and will also probably not work for your garage door. If your garage door is still opening but with some trouble there is a good chance that it is very dangerous to continue using your garage door without getting it looked at. Knowingly using it to try and save a bit of money will mean that you are pretty much asking for an injury to occur and at the very least you are probably doing further damage to your garage door and garage door opener which will end up costing you more in the long run. This might not be the most compelling thing to get you to have your garage door looked at, but when you think about the possible dangers and the lower cost of getting your garage door fixed when it first starts giving you trouble hopefully you will see that this is no alternative at all.


Another possibility is to do something equally easy to do and that is to just not use your garage. This is another time where you might not want to pay for the cost of someone to come out and fix your garage door or garage door opener, but it really is the better of the two possibilities. Not having a garage door that works, if you are someone who uses it every day to house their car, will affect your daily life pretty quickly. Your car will be exposed to the elements more often, you’ll spend more time going to and from the car and the possibility of car theft is much higher. These may be minor things, but when you think about the money you have already sunk into the value of having a garage it starts to seem a little inefficient and wasteful to throw that away just because something small started to go wrong with your garage. It is far easier and cost effective to simply make a call and get somebody to come out and repair whatever is wrong with it rather than wasting the time or taking the risk that comes with keeping your car outside of your garage for long periods of time.


Lastly is an option that you may actually be able to notice if you passed a house that was choosing it. That option is the tarp. The tarp is a pretty versatile item that can replace a garage door pretty easily. The problem is that the tarp does many of the functions of the garage door; it simply does them much worse. A tarp will be much worse at keeping your privacy like a garage door does, it is much worse at keeping the weather at bay, especially during especially tough storms. A tarp also means that there is virtually no protection from somebody who wants to get into your garage and it means that opening and closing the tarp is much tougher and more time consuming than a garage door. Essentially you are getting the benefit of having your garage shielded from view and from the rain in the best cases. This is nowhere as good or as helpful as a real working garage door and so the answer to what you should do is obvious.


With the low relative cost of most garage door parts and repairs it almost never makes sense to keep your garage door out of commission for too long. The only thing that you are really gaining from putting off a repair is an inconvenience, so why would you want to try another thing to replace your garage door in the interim? In this article we looked at some of the pretty simple and easy alternatives that you may think of off the top of your head when you first realize that your garage door has something wrong with it or it stops working. These are easy to accomplish and lazy fixes to a problem that doesn’t take all too much to fix. With how easy it is to call someone and get them to come out, even on the same day sometimes, it just doesn’t make sense to put off getting your garage door fixed for long at all. If you are playing a juggling act with your bills or doing something like that, it never hurts to call and explain your situation, you may be able to schedule the maintenance for a time you can pay or something similar.