A garage door,” my friend Wally was saying, “is tenuous at best.”
We were in the unattached garage, looking at the electronically activated door that was hanging precariously over our heads, off its guides, cable hanging loosely.
Wally is the kind of friend a new homeowner needs. He was our next-door neighbor, quiet and friendly, with knowledge about home ownership and the neighborhood, and – most importantly – a tool selection the size of a Home Depot.
Of course, he sold his house and moved shortly after we moved in, taking his tools with him, but he didn’t move far enough to escape my plea when the garage door decided to break.
“Call a pro,” Wally said.
That was four years ago, and every once in a while, Wally’s words echo in my head. “A garage door is tenuous at best.” Those words are usually followed by “call a pro.”
Now, among many homeowners, the jammed garage door would be of little concern. The bride and I, however, are a rarity in this day and age. Most people store bikes with rotting, flat tires, backup ironing boards, boxes and boxes of little tiny papers and miscellaneous merchandise in their garages.
But we actually park our automobiles in the garage.
And so I find myself writing a check to some garage-door fixer – an interesting breed. The first one, who was shaped like a garage door, informed us that it was dangerous to be trying to fix the jammed garage door ourselves and slammed that sucker back on track. A year later, a new garage-door fixer simply said garage doors are tenuous at best, took our check, gave us a card and left.
All went well until I dropped my garage door opener on the hard pavement and sent the garage door into a panic. It went up and down and up and down and halfway up and halfway down and up and down, alarming the neighbors, the neighbor’s dogs, our dog and me.
It kept this up until I shut off the power and hit the manual override. That seemed to fix everything, because the next day I turned the current back on and watched as the garage door opened and went right off its guide and jammed again. And so it was time to call the strangest of all garage-door fixers.
He said he’d be at the house at 10, showed up at 8 and wanted breakfast. He got some coffee, fixed the tenuous jammed garage door, and left us with a bill, a 90-day guarantee and a dirty coffee cup.
Which left us wondering if maybe, just maybe, we should park our automobiles outside and store our bikes with flat tires, spare ironing boards and boxes and boxes in the garage with that tenuous door.
