Alright. Heading up north to Canada where Dave in Ontario needs help with a garage door. What can we do for you?
DAVE: I’ve got the old, wooden garage door and over top of it is the wooden framework. And the paint was all bulging, so we kind of tapped on it and it looks like the whole thing’s dry-rotted. So I’m not sure if I’m opening a whole Pandora’s box and I’m not going to be able to have to tear the whole garage down. But it looks like I’ve got to replace the header in it. Now, it’s a cement-block garage, so I don’t know how involved this is going to be.
TOM: So it’s just a header over the garage door? Was there a leak above it?
DAVE: The roof was done a year and a half ago, so and – again, it’s not an – it’s a detached garage. So, if it was leaking, I’m not really – I’m not real sure whether it was long-term.
TOM: But you’re not – it’s definitely not leaking now?
DAVE: No, no, the – everything is dry in there now.
TOM: And are the roof rafters resting on that header?
DAVE: Yes. Yeah, it’s a four-sided, so I guess they’d call it a “cottage.”
TOM: What you’re probably going to have to do is you’re probably going to have to build a temporary wall to hold up the roof rafters while you disassemble the header.
DAVE: OK.
TOM: And you do that right inside the garage door. You basically build kind of a fake wall, right up to the underside of those rafters, to support them between the garage floor and the underside of the rafters while you do the disassembly and replacement of the header.
DAVE: OK.
TOM: Then once it’s all put back together, then you can disassemble that temporary wall and then the weight will be transferred back onto the new header. So that’s the process.
DAVE: Would I be jacking that up, taking a little bit of pressure off of it?
TOM: I wouldn’t jack it up but just make it snug. It probably won’t move at all.
DAVE: OK. So this is something I could probably handle myself or should I be getting a contractor in for it?
TOM: Well, if you’re pretty experienced, yes. But it’s also the kind of thing that you might need to have a pro help you with if you’ve not done it every day, because you don’t want to mess this up. If you get something wrong, then you could cause some structural problems that are going to be, you know, pretty concerning.
DAVE: Yep. Very good. That gets me pointed in the right direction.
Leave a Reply