Why would a garage door start rubbing or sticking when nothing on it broke?
Often the opening moved and the door did not. A sectional door hangs between two jambs and under a header with only a fraction of an inch to spare on each side, so a few eighths of shift in the framing shows at the door before it shows in a crack you would notice. That changes what the garage door repair is, since the fix becomes fitting the door to the opening rather than replacing parts that still work.
The ground explains why. The Oklahoma Geological Survey has reported that most of the rock layers under the state can weather into expansive clay, the kind that swells when it soaks up water and shrinks back as it dries. A wet spring and a dry August in Green Country can lift and drop a corner of a slab by small amounts, year after year, and the wall framing riding on it follows.
The cottages near downtown and the Triangle, the buff-brick ranches from after the war, and the new construction toward Prattville and the lake all sit on that ground, and each had its garage opening framed square the day it was built.
How do you tell a moved opening from worn hardware?
Look at where the trouble is and how it arrived. Movement in the opening tends to show at a fixed place on the door and to come and go with the weather. Worn hardware tends to show at a fixed point in the travel and to get steadily worse. These are the signs worth checking from the floor, with the door closed and nothing touched:
- Light at one bottom corner while the rubber seal is still soft and seated. The seal is fine, so the slab or the door’s level changed under it.
- One side of the door rubbing its stop molding harder than it used to, leaving a fresh worn stripe in the paint along that jamb.
- A stair-step crack in the brick, or a diagonal crack in the garage drywall, running off one corner of the opening, which is the wall itself moving.
- A door that changed with the season. It ran smooth last spring, started catching in late summer, and may ease up again later.
- On the hardware side, a noise at one point in the travel, usually a pop or a scrape at the same height every cycle, points at a roller, a hinge or a track joint.
- A door sitting low and cocked to one side is a different problem entirely, a lift cable, and the guide to what a broken garage door cable costs to fix covers it.
- A dry chirp from one spot that goes away with silicone is one dry roller.
Two or three of the movement signs together, and no single noisy part, is the pattern that points at the opening.
Why does the same door bind in August and run free by April?
The clay under the slab is at its smallest late in a dry summer and at its largest after the spring rains. As it shrinks, a corner of the slab or the wall can settle a little, and the opening goes slightly out of square. When the rain comes back and the clay swells, some of that recovers. A door that only misbehaves part of the year is very often following that cycle.
That pattern tempts people into the wrong fix. The opener has a force setting, and turning it up will push the door through a tight spot. It also means the opener pushes that much harder against anything under the door, because the force setting is part of what tells the opener to stop and reverse when it meets resistance. A door that needs more force to close needs someone to look at the opening, with the force setting left where it is.
What does re-hanging a door to a moved opening involve?
The door gets fitted to the opening as it stands today. Each vertical track is plumbed against the jamb it is fastened to, then fastened again where it needs to be, so the door travels straight through an opening that is no longer perfectly square. The jamb brackets get re-set to match. The stop molding along each side gets moved so the door seals against it without dragging.
At the floor, the bottom seal gets fitted to the slab as it actually sits, which in this town is often a little out of level.
Once the door hangs right, the tech checks its balance, since months of binding have worked the springs and opener harder, and finishes by testing the opener’s safety reverse against an obstruction at the floor.
Two parts of this are not homeowner work at any point. The bottom brackets at each lower corner are under full cable tension, and anything connected to the springs carries stored force. Routine garage door maintenance is homeowner territory. A re-hang belongs to the tech.
Most of this is ordinary residential garage door repair, quoted on the phone once you describe what the door is doing. If you want a sense of the range first, the price board shows what single repairs cost.
Should the door wait until the foundation work is done?
If foundation work is already planned, yes, the full re-hang usually should wait. Lifting or stabilizing a slab can raise a corner and move the opening again, and a door fitted carefully to the old shape would need fitting a second time. Until the work is finished, the aim is a door that runs safely.
That minimum is modest. The door should open and close under power without stalling and without the force turned up. The safety reverse should still work. If the door already catches hard enough that it stops partway, it gets adjusted enough to run, and the careful fitting comes after.
When the foundation side is done, the re-hang works from where the opening ended up, which may be close to square again or may be a new shape the door has to be fitted to.
When has the opening moved too far for the door that is in it?
When months of binding have bent the door itself. Sections can rack out of square from being pushed through a tight spot, and steel panels can crease along the hinge lines where the door kept folding against a jamb. Another sign is a door that still drags against one track after both tracks have been set right.
Re-hanging cannot straighten a section that has been forced out of shape for that long. Once the door is the damaged part, the useful answer is a new door sized to the opening as it stands now, with tracks set to the framing that is actually there and a bottom seal fitted to the slab underneath it. Short of that, a door that rubs and binds but is still straight and flat can be fitted to its opening and run fine for years.