Your Redwood City Garage Door, Fixed Right

Walk down most blocks in this part of the Peninsula and you're looking at a house built somewhere between 1947 and 1988, with the median landing around 1966. That's not a guess - it's the pattern across the 41 named areas that make up this stretch, from Centennial about two miles southwest of downtown, to Redwood Shores two miles northwest, out to Farm Hills four miles southwest and West Atherton just south of that. Most of those houses came with a single-panel door on side-mounted torsion hardware, or an early sectional door with hinges and rollers nobody makes quite the same way anymore. A lot of them have had one or two openers bolted on since, usually by whoever owned the place before you. We see the same handful of door models over and over because the same few builders worked this ground in the same twenty-year window. That's useful for us - it means when you call, we already have a decent guess at what's behind your door before the truck leaves. It also means a lot of hardware out there is original, which matters more than people think when a spring finally lets go.

A door from the 1960s or 70s that's had one spring replaced and otherwise runs fine isn't a candidate for replacement - it's a candidate for keeping it running. But once the panels are rusted through at the bottom, or the track is bent in more than one place, or you're looking at a second major repair inside two years, the math changes. The mild temperate climate here is actually kind to these doors; we don't get the freeze-thaw cycling or the salt-air corrosion that wrecks hardware faster in other parts of the country. So when an original door does fail structurally after fifty-some years, it's usually wear and plain age, not weather damage. That's worth knowing because it means a well-maintained original door can often be repaired rather than replaced, even at this age. Where replacement wins is insulation and safety - modern doors have sensors and auto-reverse that a lot of the 1960s and 70s stock never had retrofitted, and that's not a repair, that's a different door.

Springs, by a wide margin - specifically torsion springs on doors old enough that the original spring has simply outlived its wind count. After that, openers: gears stripping, circuit boards failing, sensors knocked out of alignment by a bike or a bin. Tracks come third, usually bent from a car clipping the door on the way out, which happens more than people admit. Rollers and cables round it out, mostly on doors that haven't had any maintenance since whoever built the house put the door in. Given how much of the stock here dates to the 1960s and 70s, we spend a fair amount of time explaining why a part that looks fine on a newer door needs replacing on an older one - tolerances were different then, and parts wear unevenly on hardware that's been carrying the same door for fifty years. If your door is quiet on one side and groaning on the other, that's almost always the spring, not the opener, no matter what the panel seems to suggest.