Garage door installation in Ottawa

Fitting a garage door in Ottawa starts with a tape measure in your garage and ends with a door that stays where it is put at waist height. The van comes from 46 Grenfell Crescent in Nepean. What gets measured, what it decides on an Ottawa garage and what the City wants to know are below; the mechanics of the fit itself are on the garage door installation page.

The measure from Nepean

Five numbers get written down before a door is ordered: the width and height of the opening, the headroom from the top of the opening to the ceiling or to the lowest thing under it (a duct, a light, a rail already there), the side room at each jamb, and the backroom from the opening to the far wall. Garaga's guidance for one of its residential torsion doors is 12 inches of headroom, plus 2 inches where an electric opener is going on. Side room is what a wall-mount opener or a spring bracket needs at the jamb. Backroom is what a taller door needs to lie flat overhead.

On a 2005 double garage in Barrhaven all five come out standard and the visit is short. On a single garage from the older half of the city the headroom figure is the one that decides the hardware, which is why the tape goes to the ceiling before anyone talks about models.

Headroom on Ottawa's older garages

The 2021 census puts 179,885 of Ottawa's 407,265 occupied homes at 1980 or earlier: the streets inside the Greenbelt, the 1950s subdivisions of Alta Vista, the 1960s blocks Mel Barr laid out in Barrhaven and the 1964 start of Kanata at Beaverbrook. A garage from those decades was framed around the door of its day, and when a modern insulated door goes into it the 12 inches are often not there. Garaga's answer between 4 3/4 and 12 inches is dual-track hardware: a second horizontal track above the first, which the top section rides on, so the door turns the corner in the space that exists. It works with torsion or extension springs, and an opener needs only 2 inches above it. An old single garage in Elmvale Acres can take a new insulated door. What it cannot take is a door ordered before the headroom was measured.

Two visits, with a made-to-measure door between them

Garaga builds each door to the inch at its plants in Saint-Georges, Quebec and Barrie, Ontario, so the measure is followed by an order and the fitting happens when the door reaches the shop. The old door keeps working in between; if it is the old door that failed, a spring or a cable is a repair booked on its own.

Fitting on a winter day

The Ottawa CDA normals for 1991 to 2020 count 73.9 days a year when the temperature never rises above zero, and about 15 nights under -20. A fitting on one of those days leaves the opening standing open for the hours the work takes. On an attached garage under a bedroom, take the milder day if the schedule offers one, clear the driveway so the sections can come in flat, and get the snow off the slab where the bottom section will sit. The balance test that closes the fitting does not change with the month.

What the City of Ottawa says about a permit

The City's list of projects that do not need a building permit includes "replacing doors or windows (provided they are in the same size opening)". A door going into the opening it came out of is on that list. Widening the opening for a 16-foot double is not, and neither is cutting a door through a wall that never had one. The City also withdraws every exemption on a designated heritage building or one inside a Heritage District Overlay. For any of those, Building Code Services answers for the address at 3-1-1 or buildingpermits@ottawa.ca; its counter at Ben Franklin Place, 101 Centrepointe Drive, is the nearest of the City's three to the shop.

The opener on the same visit

A new door often weighs more than the one it replaces, and the existing opener is checked against that weight before it is reconnected. One with no safety eyes at the bottom of the tracks is replaced rather than put back.

Book the measure

(613) 845-9950 is answered at any hour. Give the street, the opening width, whether the garage is attached and what is above it, and a rough headroom if you can reach the ceiling with a tape. For a measure with no urgency behind it, email info@protechgarage.ca. The Ottawa branch page lists the districts the van covers.