Garage door repair, installation and openers in Richmond Hill

A city that grew out from a strip of Yonge Street

Richmond Hill was a village on Yonge Street, incorporated in 1872 and no wider than the lots between Crosby Avenue and Major Mackenzie Drive. The 1971 regional reorganisation took it from 1,700 acres to 27,000 and folded in Oak Ridges, Gormley and Langstaff. Then the building started. The population was 33,030 in 1971, 80,142 in 1991 and 132,030 in 2001, and in the early 1990s Statistics Canada called Richmond Hill the fastest-growing community in Canada. Bayview Hill went up in the early 1990s. East Beaver Creek, where the city moved its hall in 1994, was built in the same years. Jefferson started taking residents in 2007.

The 2021 Census counts 69,315 occupied homes in the city. Of those, 12,175 were built in the 1980s, 15,915 in the 1990s and 10,655 between 2001 and 2005: 38,745 doors, most of them on two-car garages, and most of them hung with the opener the builder chose. An opener from 1995 has had thirty winters. When it runs loud, stalls partway or needs the wall button pressed twice, the garage door openers page explains what a replacement involves. A belt drive is the answer under a bedroom in Bayview Hill; a chain drive is fine over an unheated single in Oak Ridges.

The northern half sits on the Oak Ridges Moraine

The City's own page puts it plainly: the northern half of Richmond Hill is on the moraine, the thickest piece of glacial material in Ontario, laid down about 13,000 years ago. Bond Lake, Swan Lake and Phillip's Lake are its kettle lakes. Houses around Lake Wilcox boomed in the 1950s, the northwestern streets filled in during the mid and late 1980s, and the late 1990s pushed into the southwest and northwest. Then the Province passed the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act in December 2001 and put more than nine tenths of the moraine off limits to new development.

So the doors up there are not one age. A 1950s cottage lot on Wildwood Avenue became a year-round house, and its garage was often added later on its own slab: a detached single with a low ceiling and a door narrower than anything sold today. Two streets over is a 1999 double. The moraine is hills, and a driveway that falls toward the garage sends meltwater at the bottom of the door every March; a threshold seal on the slab fixes that for less than a door.

Permits and the commercial edge

Richmond Hill's building-permit FAQ lists what does not need a permit (shingling, eavestroughing, a shed under 10 square metres) and does not mention a door swapped in its own opening. If the opening is being widened or a wall is coming out, ask the Building Division at building@richmondhill.ca before the order goes in.

The city's border with Markham carried more than 1,000 information technology businesses by 2000. Their loading bays and service doors along Highway 7 and East Beaver Creek are commercial overhead doors, and Protech services and replaces those with their commercial openers.

What Protech does in Richmond Hill

New openers and residential doors, supplied and installed, for the houses above. Installation of a Garaga, Amarr or Stanley door where the old one is rusted through at the bottom or the panels have separated. And garage door repair: a spring gone overnight, a door crooked on one cable, a photo-eye knocked out of line by a bin. Commercial doors and openers for the Highway 7 offices and the warehouses off Leslie Street.

Getting a van from Mississauga

The branch is at 1495 Bonhill Road, off Dixie Road in Mississauga. A van reaches Richmond Hill by the 407 and comes off at Yonge Street, about 35 km by road. There is no Richmond Hill premises. Repairs are booked same day, and at this distance that means a window in the day rather than the next hour. Give the street when you write: Lake Wilcox is a different trip from Langstaff, and the time you are quoted depends on which end of Yonge you are at.

Repair or replace, and what it costs

The bill depends on the part and on the door it goes into, and the two cases here are far apart. A 1994 double in Bayview Hill with a spring gone is a repair, because the door under it is sound. A 1960s detached single off Lake Wilcox with rust through the bottom rail is a replacement, and money spent on a spring for it is money spent on a door that is leaving. Ask for the repair figure and the replacement figure together.

Garage doors in Richmond Hill

For garage doors in Richmond Hill, the City has put in writing what it wants a street-facing garage to look like. Guideline 27 of its Urban Design Guidelines of September 2013, written for singles, semis and duplexes, says the garage should not be the dominant feature of the streetscape: at most three door widths, one of them recessed behind the other two, with upgraded door styles, integrated glazing and other architectural detail encouraged.

The guidelines are written for new development, so nothing obliges the owner of a Bayview Hill house from the early 1990s to add windows. They are still the City's own design brief. When a replacement door is going to change the front of the house anyway, glazing and architectural detail are what Richmond Hill asked its builders for, and the Build Your Door designer puts the window layouts on a photograph of the house before anyone quotes.

Send the form

Use the contact form or email info@protechgarage.ca. For a new door with no urgency behind it, the Build Your Door designer lets you pick the panel, colour and windows first and ask for a quote on exactly that.