Who knew a functioning garage door is important?
We’re relatively lucky as Americans. We have numerous items at our disposal that make our lives easier. Computers or cars for instance. One thing that we might take for granted that makes our lives infinitely easier is our garage door opener.
Prior to the modern electrified motorpowered garage door openers, people would need to get out of their vehicles and open their garage doors in order to store their vehicle in a place free from the elements of the outdoors. Many people still do this to this day. I salute those people. As a generally lazy American, I want the luxury of being able to park my carcass in my car seat as I watch my garage door raise or lower.
However, I only recently started parking my car in a garage. My whole driving career up until three years ago, I have had to keep my car outside.
On Monday night, I realized the true luxury our garage doors provide us. They say you don’t notice things until they’re gone and that rang true to our opener. The cables and spring that allow the door to go up and down while keeping the full weight of the door off of the electric motor are what broke.
The cable was all wrapped up in the wheel system that is above the door and me being the handyman I am, I tried to fix it. In order to get the cable untangled, I needed to detach it from the door. After detaching both sides, I decided it would be easier to dig around up near the wheels and cables if the door was down so I unhooked the door from the opener and my wife and I proceeded to help the door down.
When we got it 3/4ths of the way down, it got much heavier than what we expected. We let the door down quickly and it hit with a thud. I didn’t think too much of it until I tried to get the cable to connect to the bottom of the door after I had rewound it all. That was nearly impossible as the spring that provides the tension on the cable was too strong and we could not get the cable to the ground.
We tried to lift the door back to its open position and no amount of prying with a shovel/crowbar could help us get it up. So there we were, the garage door permanently stuck and our cars inside of it.
We had to call a company to come and fix the cable/spring system in order to get the door hooked back up and I was late getting into the office on Tuesday because of it. It was quite the humbling experience.
The saying, “You don’t know what you’ve got til’ it’s gone,” was certainly applicable to that situation. But I learned that garage doors are much more heavy than I knew and I’m glad no one got hurt in the process.. Other than my pride, of course.
Speeding
Through
L
ife
