Fixing a Garage Door

LESLIE: Heading over to Iowa to chat with Cindy about a garage door. Tell us about what’s going on.

CINDY: Hi. I’ve got two cracks under my garage door from the edges of concrete in. The space in between the two cracks is heaved. My garage door now is kind of high-centered. It’s a little worse on the east side than the west side and I didn’t know if there’s anything you can do about like …

TOM: What kind of door is it, Cindy? Is it wood or metal?

CINDY: I think it’s fiberglass. It’s insulated.

TOM: The garage door is?

CINDY: Yes, the garage door is.

TOM: OK. If it was wood, you could actually score it and shape it and cut it to sort of follow the flow of the uneven garage floor. If it’s not, the only other thing that you could really do is to try to double up the weatherstripping or add some padding to the bottom of it to try to take up some of that space.

CINDY: OK.

TOM: And this way you can get perhaps a better seal. You know, garage floors are not dimensionally stable like they would be if it was, say, a slab foundation or something of that nature; they’re basically just covering the dirt. And so they do tend to move a lot and crack and shift. And sometimes the only way to get that to work is with some additional weatherstripping.

Now, the other thing that you could think about doing is you could add to the backside of the garage door another piece of trim; whereas the trim is actually cut to the shape of the floor. Think of it as like adding a piece of baseboard molding, where it’s sort of a one-by material that attaches to the back of the garage door and then that gets shaped to the floor. The weatherstripping goes on the bottom of that piece.

CINDY: OK. I can do that.

TOM: So there’s a couple of ways to deal with this. It’s not so unusual and not something that you have to worry too much about.