Expert Garage Door Repair,
Service, & Installation in
Albany, CA

The census is blunt about Albany's housing: a median build year of 1951, 6,161 of the city's 8,000 units standing before 1980, and 3,131 of them dating to 1939 or earlier — the biggest single group in the profile by a margin nothing else comes near. For a replacement door that matters at the framing. DASMA's history of the industry makes the point directly: as people swapped horses for cars, garages went up with doorways sized to the cars and trucks of the day. So what a 1951 opening will actually take is answered with a tape at the jambs and the header, not from the year the house went up and not from what is parked outside it. That same history dates the material, which is worth knowing before the old door comes off. Most doors made in the 1940s and 50s were wood; steel only began taking the residential market in 1980, and by 1985 nearly every manufacturer was building a steel raised-panel door. So where a door original to a house from those decades is still hanging, wood is what the trade was selling the year it went on. The history refuses to settle one thing, and the refusal is useful too: one-piece and sectional doors were built alongside each other for decades — a California manufacturer founded in 1936 on a one-piece door did not move to sectionals until the 1960s — so which way a door lifts is something to go and look at, never something to deduce from a date. And whatever is up there now is what the springs have to balance, so they get sized to that door rather than to the year on the house.