When the Garage Is the Only Way In for Someone at Your House

At most houses the garage door is the second way in. At some Marquette houses, from the first real storm until the thaw, it is the only one that works. Somebody walks with a cane or a walker, a parent is home after a hospital stay, a wheelchair cannot take the front steps once they ice over. For that person the attached garage is the level, covered path from the car to the kitchen, and when its door fails the house loses the one entrance they can use.

Is a broken garage door an emergency when someone depends on it to get in and out?

Yes. Treat it as one, and say so in the first sentence of the call. At a house where the garage is the only door a person can manage, a door stuck shut is the same call as a car trapped inside, and a door stuck open is the same call as an open bay in January. Both go on the emergency garage door repair list rather than waiting for a scheduled visit.

The part that broke matters less here than it would anywhere else. A worn spring, a stripped opener gear and a frayed cable all leave the door unusable for someone who cannot walk around to the front, and the person taking the call can only weigh that if you mention it. “My mother uses a walker and this is the only door she can get through” moves a call up the day’s list faster than any description of the noise the door made. At a house without that need, the emergency page sorts out what can wait.

Why does the garage become the main door at so many Marquette houses in winter?

The front walk and steps take the weather, and the garage does not. Marquette averages around two hundred inches of snow, and front steps carry it from the first storm to the thaw, with a glaze of ice under every fresh layer. The attached garage sits level with the driveway and under a roof.

For anyone steady on their feet that is a convenience. For someone unsteady on ice, or using a walker or a wheelchair, it decides how they leave the house at all. Plenty of families put a short ramp along the garage wall up to the step into the house, or a rail beside it, and after that the garage is how that person comes and goes until spring.

Which garage door failures hurt most at a house like that?

The ones that cut off the level path or make the garage floor unsafe to cross. These come up most:

• On the morning of an appointment, the door will not open and the car is on the other side of it. Nobody in the house can reach the car another way.
• Stuck open through a storm, the bay collects blown snow across the slab where the ramp meets the floor. It softens in the afternoon and refreezes overnight into a sheet of ice right where a walker’s feet go.
• Ice at the threshold keeps reversing the door, which touches the ridge, reads it as something in the way and goes back up. The frozen-to-the-floor guide deals with the ice itself.
• Sometimes the door is fine and the opener has died. The door could be worked by hand, but nobody home can pull the release and raise it.

The middle two tend to arrive together. A door that bounces off a ridge of ice ends up standing open, and the floor behind it starts collecting snow.

What happens in a power outage at a house where the garage is the only way in?

The garage stops being a way in for the person who depends on it. With the opener dead, the door moves only by hand through the release cord, pulled with the door fully closed, and only a door that rises easily the first few inches goes any further. That takes someone who can raise and steady it overhead. A door with a weak or broken spring is heavy from the first inch, stays down, and needs garage door spring repair before it moves at all.

The help usually lives somewhere else. A neighbor two doors down, a son or daughter over in Negaunee. Whoever comes walks up the front, and at a house where everyone uses the garage, the front walk is the one nobody has shoveled since November. A path to that door and a key to it are what let the helper in to open the garage from the inside. If nobody can come, the outage is a day to stay in, and the door waits for the power.

The helper will want how to open the garage door with the power out, which also covers the battery backup an opener can carry so the door keeps running for a while after the lines go down.

What keeps a garage door easy to live with for someone who cannot fight it?

Balance, ahead of everything else. A door whose springs and cables are set right feels light by hand and runs on the opener without strain. At this house the opener is how the door gets used every day, and an opener pulling against a heavy door is the one that quits in the middle of winter. A door that has started to feel heavy, or that the opener strains to raise, is worth a look before the snow rather than after.

Keep the threshold clear. The bottom seal only closes tight against a clean slab, and a tight seal keeps meltwater and drifting snow off the strip of floor inside the door, which at this house is the walking path. On a storm day, shovel the apron and sweep that last foot inside before dark.

Some openers can close themselves on a timer and tell a family member’s phone where the door is, and what a garage door opener can handle on its own goes through which ones do.

Then the remote. One remote clipped to the visor of a car someone else drives does nothing for the person who needs the door. Give them their own, kept wherever they keep their keys, whether that is a bag hooked on the walker, a coat pocket, or the car they ride in. A spare pairs to most openers from the learn button on the motor unit.