Repair It, Or Let It Go

Hollywood has a large stock of homes built decades ago, and plenty of them still have their original garage door, or a replacement that went on in the nineties. Those doors are usually worth saving. Wooden doors can be repaired at the stiles and rails, sanded and refinished. Steel doors with surface rust can be treated and repainted. The hardware on any door is replaceable: springs, cables, rollers, hinges, bottom brackets, and the tracks themselves if they are worn through or bent. It is common for a twenty-year-old door to run like new after its working parts are replaced and the door is properly balanced. In those cases repairing is genuinely the better answer, and it preserves the look of the house.

The honest exceptions are structural. A door with rust that has eaten through the bottom section, panels that have delaminated or cracked, a sagging door whose internal structure has failed, or a discontinued door with no available replacement sections, will keep costing you money. We also run into doors whose original hardware was never designed for the weight they are carrying today, or that use obsolete springs and drums we can no longer source safely. When that is the case, replacing the door is the cheaper path over the next few years. We give you the same information either way: what is sound, what is failing, what parts are available, and what a flat-rate repair would cover. Older doors in Dania Beach and Hollywood frequently need attention at the bottom corner brackets and rollers first, because coastal humidity gets to those small parts long before it reaches the paint.