Side-Hinged Garage Doors

• Steel, timber or aluminium leaves
• Welded steel subframe, adjustable hinges
• No headroom required

A side-hinged garage door opens like a very large pair of gates: two leaves on heavy hinges, swinging outward from the frame. It is the oldest way to close a garage opening and, for a certain kind of garage, still the best one.

Who these suit

• Garages used as workshops. You open one leaf to walk in with a toolbox and leave the other shut. No motor to run, no door lifting over your head every time you fetch something.
• Storerooms and outbuildings. Where the space behind the opening is racked out to the ceiling, an overhead door has nowhere to go. Side-hinged leaves keep the whole roof void free.
• Older homes. On a heritage or face-brick house, a pair of timber or panelled steel leaves reads correctly where a modern roll-up curtain does not.
• Openings with no headroom at all. Nothing runs above the lintel, so a low garage that will not take a roll-up or sectional door will still take these.

How we build them

Leaves are made to the measured opening rather than cut down from a stock size, because a side-hinged door is only as good as its frame. We fit a welded steel subframe into the reveal first, square and plumb, and hang the leaves off that. Hanging heavy leaves straight onto brick is what causes the classic side-hinged fault: a door that drops at the outer corner and scrapes the driveway within a year.

You choose the leaf construction. Galvanised steel sheet on a steel frame is the workhorse — light, cheap to maintain, and powder-coated to whatever colour the house needs. Meranti or cedar boarding gives the traditional look and can be stained rather than painted. Aluminium is the coastal answer, and we recommend it anywhere within a few kilometres of the sea.

Hardware that decides whether you like the door in five years

• Hinges. Three per leaf as standard on anything over 2 100mm, adjustable so the door can be trued up after the building settles.
• Drop bolts. Top and bottom on the passive leaf, into a socket set in the slab. This is what stops the pair rattling in wind.
• Locking. A mortice deadlock through the active leaf into the frame, or an internal locking bar on both leaves for a workshop you leave for weeks.
• Stays. Hold-open stays so a leaf cannot swing back into a car door when the southeaster comes up.

The one thing to check before you order

Side-hinged leaves need swing room outside the opening. Measure from the face of the wall to whatever is in front of it: a boundary wall, a step, a paving edge, a parked vehicle. You need roughly half the opening width in clear space in front of each leaf. If the driveway falls away steeply from the garage, tell us — we set the leaves higher and use a threshold seal to keep the gap weathertight.

Motorising them

They can be automated with a swing-arm operator, one arm per leaf, of the same type used on driveway gates. It works well, but it is slower than a roll-up motor and needs the swing room kept permanently clear. Most of our side-hinged customers stay manual and spend the difference on better locking.

Servicing and repairs

We repair side-hinged doors we did not fit — dropped leaves, seized hinges, split timber bottom rails, frames that have rusted where they meet the slab. In many cases the frame is sound and only the leaves need replacing, which is a fraction of a new door. Send a photo of the opening from outside and we will tell you which it is.

For a quote, we need the opening width and height, the wall material, and how much clear space sits in front. A consultant calls you back the same working day.