Garage door repair, installation and openers in Etobicoke

Rex Heslop's bungalows

Rexdale is named for the man who built it. In 1951 Rex Heslop bought the farmland north of the planned Toronto bypass that became the 401, and on 24 April 1952 he sold the first forty houses on Allenby Avenue to forty employees of the A.V. Roe aircraft plant. The houses were bungalows and one-and-a-half storeys in brick or pre-cast concrete panel. He had already put up 400 houses in Alderwood, west of Brown's Line, after starting his company in 1947. Etobicoke's central and northern streets are that generation: a single garage, attached or detached, built for a 1950s car.

A 1950s single garage is the Etobicoke call. The opening is 8 feet wide or less, the headroom above it is short, and the door in it is a replacement of a replacement. Before ordering an opener or a door, measure the headroom above the opening and the side room beside it, because a standard opener and a standard track do not always fit and the low-headroom version is a different order. Protech installs residential openers and residential doors sized to the opening that is there.

The Kingsway and Humber Valley

Robert Home Smith laid out the Kingsway from the early 1900s between the Humber River and Mimico Creek, Bloor to Dundas, on garden-city lines with an English bias: Arts and Crafts houses, Humber sandstone, no house built without his staff's approval, and, in his own words, discreetly placed garages. Humber Valley Village next door is the same idea. A garage door on those streets has to disappear into the house, and the Build Your Door tool puts a Garaga design on a photo of the actual elevation so the panel style and the colour are settled before the quote. Etobicoke had 376,237 people in 2021; the Kingsway is a small part of them and a large part of the new-door calls.

West of Kipling, industry since 1953

Heslop sold industrial lots as fast as house lots. By September 1953 eighteen companies had bought land west of Kipling Avenue, and within a few years the Rexdale industrial area was the largest in the township. When Malton became Pearson, a second industrial belt grew along the 427 to the west. Those buildings run commercial overhead doors and dock doors, and Protech supplies and services commercial doors and commercial openers there, a short run from Mississauga industrial streets that look the same.

The permit position in Toronto

Etobicoke has been part of the City of Toronto since the 1998 amalgamation, so the City's rule applies. The City's building permit page lists replacing a window or door in an existing opening in a detached, semi-detached or row house, or in an accessory building serving it, as work that needs no permit, provided the opening does not move or grow and the structure around it is not touched. Widening a 1950s single opening to take a wider door does need one, and that is a common Etobicoke question.

Getting a van into Etobicoke

Protech does this work in Etobicoke from Mississauga. There is no Toronto address and no Toronto location; the shop is at 1495 Bonhill Rd #14, about 10 km by road on the 401 to the 427, which drops onto Burnhamthorpe and The West Mall. Repairs are booked same day. Give the street and say whether the garage is attached, detached or behind the house on a shared drive: Alderwood, Rexdale and the Kingsway are different jobs and the van is loaded differently for each.

Repair or replace, in Etobicoke's terms

A 1952 bungalow's single steel door with a rusted bottom section and an opener that was never the right size for the headroom is a new door and a low-headroom opener in one visit. A Kingsway door that works and does not suit the house is a design question and the Build Your Door tool answers it. A 1990s double in a newer pocket with a broken spring is a spring repair and nothing else. Ask for the repair figure and the replacement figure together.

Garage doors in Etobicoke

Protech supplies and installs Garaga, Amarr and Stanley garage doors in Etobicoke from the Mississauga shop, and in Long Branch the door on a new house is part of a planning review before it is a catalogue choice. The City's Long Branch Neighbourhood Character Guidelines, approved by Council on 2018-01-31, cover the streets between Lake Ontario and the rail corridor from Twenty Third Street west to Forty Second Street, and a Committee of Adjustment application there has to come with a checklist showing how the house meets them.

On garages they are specific. A garage is to sit at grade and behind the main plane of the front wall, so that it does not become the dominant element of the front of the house, and its materials are to be coherent with the rest of the building in type, size, fine-grain detailing and quality. The guidelines' standard for front entrances makes the same point from the other side: integral garages are not to dominate the main facade.

A door replaced on an existing Long Branch house goes through none of that, because the guidelines apply to applications. They still make a sound brief for the order: a door whose colour and panel scale belong to the brick around it. Build Your Door shows a Garaga model on a photograph of the house, and the garage doors range has the panel styles.

Booking from Etobicoke

Send the contact form with the street, the garage type, the headroom if you can measure it, and what the door is doing. Or email info@protechgarage.ca. A new door or opener with no urgency behind it gets a quote first.