Expert Garage Door Repair,
Service, & Installation in
Cathedral City, CA

The order we work in is not a preference, it follows how the door goes together. Every section above the bottom one is located by the section under it, so a stack comes apart from the top down and only ever goes back together from the floor up. The bottom section goes on the concrete and gets squared to the opening before anything lands on top of it. Each section after that has its hinges bolted, its roller stems in the track and its fasteners pulled up tight before the next one is lifted on, because once there is weight sitting above a hinge, nobody is getting a wrench back onto it without undoing the work. The counterbalance is set last, against the door that is now actually on the opening. The opener goes back on after that and never before it, and the door gets run by hand first.

What the census can put a date on here is the opening, not the stack. Cathedral City's 23,114 housing units sit bunched in the middle of the table: 15,612 of them, two thirds of everything counted, went up in the thirty years from 1980 through 2009. Inside that block the 1980s stand apart from both decades beside them, at 7,092 units, while the 1990s and the 2000s finish level with each other — 4,180 against 4,340, a gap of 160 where the sampling error on that comparison runs to 582. At the ends of the table the ranking runs out altogether: 6,251 units standing from before 1980 and 5,591 from 2000 on, 27.0% and 24.2% of the stock, 660 units between them against a margin of 721 on the difference. The Bureau will not say which of those two ends of town is the bigger one, and neither will we.

None of it changes the sequence, and that is the useful part of knowing it. A build year dates the slab, the jambs and the header, and where the garage went up with the house those were framed in one go. It does not say how many sections are in the stack in front of us, what has been swapped into the middle of it since, or whether the hinges have been off before — so the tape and the level come out ahead of the parts, every time. Where the original hardware is still up, all of it has been going up and down for the same length of time; the house next door may be on its second set of everything, and no table records which is which.

Rollers, hinges, cables, drums, springs, track and openers, on the eighties and nineties houses and on the 2000s stock alike — same order at both, because the door in front of us decides it and the year on the record does not.