Wooden Garage Doors

• Timber on a galvanised steel frame
• Sealed all six faces before hanging
• Tip-up or sectional mechanism

A wooden garage door is the one people notice from the street. On a face-brick or plastered home it does something no steel curtain manages: it warms the whole front elevation. The trade-off is that timber is a material with opinions, and it has to be built and finished properly or it will tell you about it within two summers.

Timbers we work in

• Meranti. The South African default. Stable, takes stain evenly, and reasonably priced. Best all-round choice for a door that will be sealed and maintained.
• Cedar. Lighter in weight than meranti, which matters on a large double door, and naturally resistant to insect attack. More expensive, and it silvers if left unsealed.
• Saligna. Hard, heavy and dense with a deep red grain. Beautiful on a single door; on a wide double we usually talk customers out of it on weight alone.
• Pine, laminated and sealed. The budget option. It works if the door is under a deep overhang and gets recoated on schedule. In full western sun it will not last.

How the door is put together

Boards are cut to the measured opening and mounted on a galvanised steel frame rather than glued into a timber-only panel. The steel carries the load and the timber does the looking. This is the difference between a door that stays square and one that racks into a parallelogram after a wet winter.

Every face is sealed before the door is hung, including the top and bottom edges and the back. Most failed timber garage doors in this country failed because someone sealed the front, hung it, and left the end grain open to soak up water off the driveway. We seal all six faces on the bench.

Mechanisms

Timber cannot roll up, so a wooden garage door runs on one of two mechanisms:

• Tip-up (up-and-over). The whole door lifts as one panel on a counterbalanced frame and sits horizontally under the ceiling. Simple, few moving parts, and the traditional choice for a solid timber door.
• Sectional. The door is built in hinged horizontal sections that stack against the ceiling. Better sealed, quieter, and it lets you park closer to the door because nothing swings out into the driveway.

Both take a standard garage door motor. On a heavy hardwood double door we specify a motor one rating step up from what the width alone would suggest, and we set the counterbalance springs for the actual weighed mass of the finished door rather than a table figure.

What maintenance actually involves

Once a year, wash the face down and look at the bottom 200mm and the vertical edges. If the seal has gone matt or chalky, give it a light sand and two fresh coats. That is a Saturday morning. Leave it five years and the job becomes a strip back to bare timber, which is a different exercise entirely. Doors facing north and west in Gauteng need this more often than sheltered south-facing ones at the coast.

Where wood is the wrong answer

We will say so. A door in permanent full sun with no overhang, a coastal property in a salt wind, or a rental where nobody will ever recoat it — in those cases a timber-look aluminium or powder-coated steel door gives you most of the appearance and none of the maintenance. We would rather sell you the right door once.

Repairs and refinishing

We repair and refinish existing wooden garage doors: replacing rotted bottom boards, re-squaring racked frames, replacing tip-up gear and springs, and stripping and resealing whole doors. If the frame is sound, refinishing is far cheaper than replacement.

Send us the opening width and height, which way the door faces, and whether there is an overhang above it. We will quote the timber and finish that will actually last on your house.