KKELLER14K wrote:
Just curious...why didn't you make your double garage doors a little taller than standard? It looks like you had the height inside to do it. I built my double garage at 8 foot 6 inches so that I could pull my dually in without hitting the cab lights and ...so glad I did...just a fore-site. I know the header is already in and the sheeting is on to but.... hey, you have the RV bay any way right?....awesome project. Keep the pics coming!
We originally were going to reuse our old garage doors, which were seven feet tall. They were nice Clopay insulated doors, steel skin on both sides. The old garage had a very low ceiling, so the tracks and springs were the low-headroom/quick-turn style. When we started pricing out all the new hardware and lift motors we needed for the new garage we found out that we were within just a few hundred dollars of buying new doors, so we bought new doors instead. (I sold the old doors, tracks, and lifts on craigslist in one day!) The door openings had already been built though, but we weren't so far along that they couldn't have been changed.
In considering what it would take to make the door openings eight feet tall, it was amazing how many things that affected. First, we would have had to change the beam configuration in the garage ceiling. Possibly to one that required center supports. If you look at the pictures of the upper bay when it was being constructed, you see that the space between the top of the garage door and the bottom of the floor above it is all taken up with door header and floor beam height. In order to raise the garage door height a foot using these beams, we would have had to raise the floor height a foot as well. The floor of the new living space above the garage is already six inches higher than the room next to it. The height of the ridge beam in the roof above the new room would have also needed to go higher, and I wasn't wanting it to be significantly higher than the rest of the house. We backed away from that after a short discussion.
Actually, my truck will fit under a seven foot opening. I pulled it into the old garage a few times when I was working on it. The radio antenna drags on the door, but it squeaked through otherwise. I had to be careful opening the hood though, because it would hit whatever was above it, so at least I won't have that issue any longer.
:):)
