Warranty 101: Standing Behind Your Garage Doors

If you're considering ordering a set of custom garage doors, you might find this little industry secret helpful: manufacturers sometimes make mistakes! Yep, that's right. Most companies don't brag about it but it happens. The important thing is what the company does next. Here's my story...

A few years ago, we made a set of 4 garage doors in mangaris mahogany for a client in NJ (Stephen). Within a year, Stephen noticed that the boards on the doors were separating so he sent me pictures and (very politely) called me to ask if this was "normal." It definitely wasn't so I told him that his Lifetime Warranty covered this issue and that we would take care of replacing the doors, no questions asked. We determined that the problem was caused by a defective batch of wood so we built 4 brand new doors in African Mahogany & shipped them out.

After getting the new doors, Stephen sent this e-mail & pix:

8/30/2008

Rhys,

First, sorry for the delay to thank you for the absolutely terrific customer service. One always worries about making a large purchase via the internet, but you have demonstrated an extremely high level of integrity with how you have stood behind warranting the quality of your product.

I'm sure the problem with the original doors was a fluke and the replacement doors are fantastic. I truly appreciate how you took control over having them put in with minimal effort on my part.

I would be pleased to be a reference for you with any potential east coast customers and I have included a couple of snap shoots you should feel free to use as you want:

Again, sorry for the late thank you. You and your doors are fantastic.

Best regards,

Stephen
Alpine, NJ
____

OK, it's a little self-serving and yes, I hope my boss reads this, but the point is that you should really be sure that the company you are working with stands behind their product, especially when there's a problem!

All Glass / All the Time

Glass garage doors are growing in popularity for contemporary-styled homes. These doors feature a fully stained & finished cedar exterior and interior.


Compromise is the secret to good relationships and great garages. In this case "He" has a completely decked out garage so "She" wanted something nice to look at besides his workbench!


Given the Bentley and other nice toys, they also didn't want to encourage prying eyes, so we used insulated, mirrored glass.


The result is a set of garage doors that completely reflect the personality of their owners!

Integrated Beauty

Your custom garage doors don't have to be really exotic to be truly beautiful.

This project works because the homeowner chose designs that are in keeping with her home's architecture.

But she took it a step further by having us build a matching garage service door.

Our service doors are built like our 7 Series doors: beautiful tongue & groove wood overlaid on a highly insulated steel slab. For garages, this combination offers outstanding insulation and durability. The interior of the door is enameled white steel, just like the garage doors.

But really, it's the outside that gets all the attention!

White Oak Garage Doors

These custom wood garage doors are made out of white oak and were designed to match a homeowner's unique entry door that he found in Argentina.

To get just the right look, we carefully drew up a CAD for the grill and had it handmade by a great custom iron smith in New Mexico.























The architect for the garage doors on the project, Troy Prosa, designed a metal background to give the look of a window without sacrificing the homeowner's privacy.


















Custom matching shutters were the final touch.

















I'll post more pictures after these are installed!

UPDATE!

The doors & shutters were installed and here's a peek at how they look:


















































If you want oak garage doors, use white oak and not red oak because it is much more resistant to rot and decay. And obviously, we would be happy to build them for you!

Interior View of IDC 7 Series Garage Doors

Exterior View

Interior View

Here's a look at the inside of IDC's 7 Series custom garage doors. Unlike all wood garage doors, these doors are built on an enameled steel-12 R-value foam-steel foundation that never needs painting, will not warp or rot, and can be cleaned off with a hose! So you can have the beauty and look of real wood garage doors with the benefits of highly insulated, modern steel garage doors.

Mission Possible

This homeowner had a beautiful Simpson entry door and wanted her garage doors to match them right down to the dentil molding. We added a copper kickplate to match her new copper gutters and downspouts, all of which will eventually patina naturally, or you can accelerate it with these recipes.

Form follows function (but not by much!)

One of my favorite architects, Frank Lloyd Wright, championed the idea that form should follow function, or at least that the function of something shouldn't be hidden. Kind of a reaction to all the gew-gaw of Victorian architecture. One of my other favorite architects, Charles Stinson, uses this in his own clean style of design. So when he had us build garage doors for his own home, Charles was a stickler for the tiniest details of these deceptively simple doors. The function of these doors (horizontal sections with 3 section breaks) isn't hidden but to create a perfectly pleasing form (i.e. perfectly evenly arranged horizontal slats), we engineered specially milled widths of boards to ensure that the section breaks 'broke' evenly within the the V-grooves of the boards.

If you're like me, you probably wouldn't notice this level of detail, but Charles does and that's why he's a renowned architect and I'm just a Garage Doorologist.

Here are some other doors that are similar: