How to Protect the Most Expensive Thing in Your Garage
Unless you’ve managed to squeeze a cabin cruiser into your garage, your car is probably the most expensive thing in it.
While the general feeling is that, once it’s in the garage, your car is ‘protected’, the reality can be quite different.
From something falling off a shelf and damaging the car, to scratching it as you work around it, or the kids leaning their bikes against it, there are many ways that the garage can be a bit of a hostile environment for your car.
So, while your garage protects your car from things like sun and snow, there are other hazards in the garage that can actually make it quite damaging to your car.
Protect Your Car in the Garage
The following are just some of the ways you can safeguard your car while it’s in the garage.
1. Close the Garage Door
In summer, it’s easy to just leave the garage door open some days because you’re in and out of the garage so often. In winter, you might open the door to warm-up the car before you leave for the day. Sometimes you might stop the garage door opener before the door closes completely.
It’s no surprise, but a car insurance company published information that shows open garage doors make it more likely that your car will be stolen.
To put it another way, the old movie “Gone in 60 Seconds” had it right. It takes less than a minute for a thief to drive off in your car. In fact, some estimates put it down to 10 seconds!
2. Park in the Right Spot
Parking your car in the garage as far away from hazards as possible, and even not hitting anything as you park it, goes a long way to protecting it. But that can be tough to do when it’s difficult to know exactly how close you are to objects.
One of the most popular, and simple, ways to park your car perfectly every time is the “tennis-ball-from-the-ceiling” trick. It begins by finding the perfect place for your car to come to a stop while parking it in the garage. You may need someone outside the car to help you.
Once you find the spot, hang a tennis ball from the ceiling so that, as you park, it would contact the windshield in line with your rearview mirror. Every time you park, when the tennis ball touches the windshield at a point in line with the mirror, you know the car is perfectly aligned front and back and side-to-side. And if it doesn’t quite line up every time, you’ll know just how far off you are and can decide whether that’s good enough.
Or you can try a more 21st-century approach with garage door opener manufacturer Liftmaster’s laser-guided parking assist accessory.
3. Stop Dinging Your Doors
Even if you find the perfect parking spot to minimize damage to your car, you still might need to be careful when you open the doors. If not, the door can hit the garage wall or another object in the garage. You can attach pool noodles on the wall or objects the doors might hit to stop them from being damaged.
Needless to say, it’s worth doing everything you can to protect the most expensive thing in your garage. If you’re looking for a more secure garage door or garage door opener, call us at 905-472-9178 or contact us online.
5 Ways to Reduce Your Chances of Needing Garage Door Repair
You might not think of it this way, but one of the most amazing facts about your home is that you don’t need garage door repair more often.
Think about it. It’s the largest, heaviest and one of the most frequently used moving objects in your home. The next largest moving object (maybe your front door?) is a fraction of its size. Even your garage door opener, which lifts and lowers this massive moving object every day, can give you decades of repair-free operation. Wouldn’t life be great if you got that kind of performance from everything in your home, like your washing machine?
But that remarkable track record of worry-free operation can leave you unprepared. Your garage door and door opener aren’t infallible. They can break, stop working and need emergency repairs. For you, the real problem can be that when you need a garage door repair, you’ll be stranded, either inside or outside of your garage.
How to Minimize Your Garage Door Repair
While it’s not necessarily a terrible situation, the need for garage door repair can happen at inopportune times. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to reduce the chances of it happening.
1. Keep Stuff Away from the Door
If you’re like most people, you use every available space in your garage to store things – even your car sometimes!
But you should never store anything too close to the door for a number of reasons. First, stacking boxes just inside the door can present a hazard of them falling on you when you open the door.
But even storing things at the sides of the door can be a problem. The cables on either side of your door help to keep the door balanced as it opens and closes. In the closed position, the cables remain fairly close to the door, making it look like you have more space than you actually do. But when the door opens, the cables are pulled back into space just behind them. Anything you store in that space just behind the cable might get damaged when the door opens and closes, and the cables may stretch or fray over time.
2. Keep Your Eyes Peeled
You should regularly give your door and opener a visual inspection. Check that the bottom of the door meets the garage floor evenly across the width of the door. Look for signs of corrosion metal parts. And watch the path of the door as it opens and closes to make sure it moves smoothly throughout the operation.
3. Listen Carefully
Simply due to its sheer size, your garage door can make some noise as it operates. But any change in the sound it makes can be a sign of an impending repair. Any sort of grinding, scraping or other unusual sounds should be investigated immediately.
4. Make Your Garage Door Part of Your Regular Home Maintenance Schedule
“Clean the eavestroughs” is on it. So is “replace the furnace filter”. And those things get done, right? But “inspect your garage door” probably isn’t on your list of “things to do” around the house. But if you put it there, it’ll get done and you’ll be less likely to need a garage door repair.
5. Don’t DIY
Yes, your garage door is huge. It is very heavy. It’s balanced by cables and springs that are under high tension. And if you decide to work on your garage door yourself, you’ll probably need to disconnect it from the garage door opener, which means all the safety systems are disconnected. The potential for needing even more repairs to the door, and the threat to your personal safety, are very high.
Stating it as simply as possible: do not try garage door repair yourself.
Instead, call the repair experts at Markham Garage Doors at 905-472-9178!
5 Ways to Maximize the Storage Space in Your Garage
Garages are for cars. But, judging by what you find inside most of them, garages are the place for anything but the car. Especially if you have kids, you have a lot of ‘stuff’, and anything that doesn’t have a place or is too big for your home, gets tossed in the garage.
Not that there’s anything wrong with your garage playing that role in your home. It’s just that, in the act of tossing the stuff, garages can quickly become unorganized stacks of random items, fill up far faster than they should and never be a place where you can find anything fast.
If you want to better use the space in your garage for storage, try some of the following helpful tips.
1. Add Shelving
Yes, you probably thought of this one, or you already have a shelf or two. But think about using space that isn’t usually used for shelving. Like between the vehicles in a two-car garage. In any case, shelving helps you get more usable space without taking up more floor space.
2. Build a Shelf Bay
Many urban garages, or those on older homes, have barely enough room to squeeze in a car. You can build a large shelf bay at the far end of your garage such that the front of your car fits underneath it and all the space above it becomes storage space.
3. Install Slat Walls
These are similar to what’s used in many retail stores, particularly shoe and sports equipment stores, to display products on a wall. Hooks and shelving slide into the wall slats at any level on the wall, giving you flexible, floor-to-ceiling options for storage.
4. Use Pegboard
Talk about versatility, pegboard lets you hang tools, clothing, equipment – anything that can hang on a hook – anywhere on your wall.
5. Put Up Cabinets
This one is for the ultimate in a well-organized garage. Whether you use custom cabinetry built to fit perfectly in your garage, or just install a standard set, cabinetry not only gives you more places to store your things, but it lets you close the cabinet door so you don’t have to see all the clutter.
You probably have a lot more space in your garage than you think. You just have to use it better to have a great place to store your stuff.
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