Garage door Installation, Electrical and Siding the Front Wall

Garage door installation and lights for our new addition! The final stage of our garage is here! OMG this one just felt like the endless project. First we poured the slab and then we poured the apron. Then we framed in the building. Then Lodi finished the roof. Then we did the side and back wall with plywood and steel siding. And now, finally, we framed in the front of the garage and ran electrical and then finished it with trim and vinyl siding. I’m embarrassed to admit that this project kicked our butts so hard it ran us from June to November!

You guys know we are hard core do it yourselfers but, every now and again, between aggravation, exhaustion and just plain old fear of doing it wrong, we hire it out. That’s what we did with our garage door and it was for a number of reasons.

The first, biggest reason, is that they don’t sell six foot tall garage doors. We would have had to have purchased an eight foot tall door and cut it down two feet.

The second reason is I think most people have heard the horror stories of people losing eyes or being maimed by installing garage doors incorrectly… *shudders*

The third reason was that we didn’t even WANT a six foot tall garage door! We wanted, actually really kind of needed, at least a seven foot door.

Which means it has to be custom because even though we could have ordered a seven foot high door it wouldn’t have fit with a regular track system anyway. Every garage door I looked at required a minimum of 16 inches of head room above the door which we DO NOT have here unless we sacrificed what we actually wanted and went with a six foot tall door instead.

And, not to repeat myself, but the only way we could get a 6 foot tall garage door was to cut down an 8 foot tall door.

I really was not feeling right about buying a nearly $700 garage door and cutting it down… what if we screwed it up? Or lost an eye?! (Are you feeling that I really didn’t want to install a garage door anyway?)

Chancing maybe throwing $700 out the window gave me understandable pause…

And that $700 would not even include the motor to run the thing and that would have probably been another $200 at least.

So, we could have POSSIBLY spent nearly $1,000 (and a lot of work!) for a garage door that wasn’t even as tall as we wanted anyway!

A few years back my mom and aunt gave me the wonderful Xmas gift of garage door openers for our current garage. I love them. They still work just perfect. The company that installed them was quick and just all around great people.

So, we gave them a call.

After meeting with him and learning the awesome news that we could get a seven foot tall and nine foot wide garage door that will practically match what we already have I basically didn’t even look at the quote I just said: YES!!

Funny story: Lodi scheduled them for us and the garage door guy I met out at the house laughed and told me that Lodi had told him to not take NO as an answer from me lol. Fair enough!

All in it came to about $1,800 which was installation and electric motor etc. All of it including the door height we so desperately wanted.

Ouch on the price but it was WORTH IT!

(In my last couple of posts I mentioned saving quite a bit of money on this build by getting “oopsie” plywood for a deal and going with steel instead of vinyl siding for most of the addition… the savings more than covered the new garage door!)

After I met with the garage door guy something happened to me that I have not, I’m sorry to say, felt for even one little second throughout this entire endless project.

I actually got excited!

After all the stress and worry I put myself through trying to figure out the garage door suddenly, with the swipe of a credit card, this project was almost done as far as our work was concerned.

When you order steel from Menards (like we did for the roof, side and back wall) they include 16 foot 2x4s acting as a “pallet” to support the steel in shipping. I forgot to tell Lodi when he went to pick it up that he could have left those 2x4s behind and we would get reimbursed for them.

He brought them home but I wasn’t mad.

There has literally never been a moment working on this place when 2x4s will not be used… seriously.

Case and point right now!

I used those 2x4s to frame in the front wall to the measurements I was given from garage door guy. As you can see it was just two little walls with one board on top. (This wall is not holding up the roof or anything so I didn’t need to put in a full header which is great because, obviously, I didn’t have room for one anyway.)

We did use a cement gun to tack our walls down to the slab as well as screw it all together with 3″ torch screws.

We also had enough 2x4s leftover to add a little more support that we’ve been planning on doing since we framed the building. We ran one along the bottom of the joist hangers on our main ledger board and supported them along the whole wall as well.

Those support 2x4s actually gave me the perfect spot for a switch and a couple of outlets…

The reason we were SO adamant on getting at least a seven foot tall garage door was because we purchased another small car for Lodi to drive to get better gas mileage so we really wanted to be able to store the pickup here.

This addition will also accommodate our ATV (RZR Side by side) and our lawn mower freeing up a ton of room in our main garage. I also plan on using this space for our yard and gardening tools etc.

With the front wall up and covered in plywood and house wrap I ran to our local hardware store and picked up the wire, outlets etc. that I needed to run electrical throughout the building. I put in three outlets on the side wall, an outlet in for the garage door and two lights besides.

Ok, this isn’t quite the final final final step lol The new LED light bulbs I got for our new garage stall deserve their own post because they are WICKED, can’t wait to show you guys soon!

A couple more hours of work and we sided (and trimmed out) the front of our new addition using the same siding as our original garage.

We are so excited to have another garage stall!