What a Dunwoody garage renovation decides about the garage door opener
The 1970s and 1980s houses in Dunwoody get bought for the schools and then renovated, and plenty of those renovations reach the garage. An office goes in above it, or the ceiling comes up to make room for a lift. Each change moves where an opener can hang and how its wires get to it.
When should the opener come into a garage renovation plan?
While the ceiling and walls are still open. An opener hangs from the framing and its wiring runs through it, so where it mounts and where its wires run are easiest to settle at rough-in, before insulation and drywall. Once the ceiling closes, garage door opener installation in Dunwoody has to work around whatever the renovation left behind.
In practice that means one walk through the bare garage with the contractor, deciding which kind of opener the finished garage will have and where it mounts. A ceiling-hung opener needs a clear strip down the middle of the ceiling, from the header over the door to a point past where the open door stops. A wall-mount opener drives the spring bar over the door from one end, so it needs a door on torsion springs and room on the wall beside it. On a 1970s door still running extension springs along the tracks, the spring conversion comes first and is quoted with the opener.
What changes for the opener when a bedroom goes in over the garage?
The joists overhead now carry a floor, and somebody will sleep on it. A ceiling-hung opener bolts its motor to those joists, so the hum and the jolt at the start of every lift travel up into the room. Settle that while the ceiling is open, either with solid blocking where the motor hanger will land or by taking the motor off the joists altogether with a wall-mount.
The drive matters too, and the belt drive for a room over the garage is the usual pick there. What the renovation adds is the mount. Blocking is a small item for the framer while the joists are bare. After the drywall, the installer finds the joists through the ceiling and hangs the motor from whatever is up there.
A wall-mount puts nothing on the ceiling at all. It sits beside the door at the end of the spring bar, so there is no rail down the middle of the garage and no motor bolted to the floor framing of the new room. It is the dearer option, and under a bedroom the one worth pricing. The price page shows what a wall-mount opener costs installed here next to the ceiling-hung drives.
What happens to the opener and the track when the garage ceiling is raised?
A raised ceiling usually changes the door’s track before it changes the opener. With the extra height, the track can run farther up the wall before it curves back, so the open door rests up near the new ceiling instead of low over the car. Openers that hang from the ceiling are built around the standard track, and the usual pairing for a raised one is a wall-mount beside the door.
The track change is door work, and it gets quoted with the opener because each decides the other. Taller tracks also mean springs and cable drums set up for the higher travel, and on an original wood door the cleaner answer is sometimes a new garage door ordered for the new ceiling. Either way the installer measures the room over the door the same way, since a torsion setup needs about 12 inches above it.
A raised ceiling with the standard track kept is the other version. A ceiling-hung opener can still work there, hung on longer drops down to the height of the rail. A long drop sways and carries vibration, so the blocking point from a room overhead applies here as well.
What has to be wired before the drywall goes up?
Power at the motor, and a low-voltage wire from the motor to each safety sensor and to the wall button. Every one of those runs ends where the chosen opener will sit, and all of them are far easier inside an open wall than across finished drywall.
- An outlet at the motor. For a ceiling-hung opener that is in the ceiling near where the motor will hang, past the open door. For a wall-mount it is on the wall beside the door. It is the electrician’s line item on the renovation, not part of the opener quote.
- A wire to each safety sensor, low on either side of the door opening.
- A wire from the wall button by the house door back to the motor.
- The outside keypad, which on most openers is wireless and needs only a spot on the door trim within reach of a driver’s window. An exterior keypad runs $80 to $150, installed and programmed.
Most original garages here show the old way of doing it, a thin white wire stapled along the ceiling and down the wall from the button to the motor. Run inside the new wall, the same wire is out of sight and out of reach of the first shelf bracket somebody screws in.
Can a garage with a car lift or a ceiling storage lift still have an opener?
Yes, though rarely a ceiling-hung one. That opener’s rail runs down the center of the garage from the header, the same strip of ceiling a car lift needs for the raised car’s roof and a storage lift needs for its platform. A wall-mount opener at the side of the door leaves the whole ceiling to the lift, and it runs $900 to $1,400 installed.
The open door is the other half of the problem. On a standard track a raised door lies flat under the ceiling, which is right where the lifted car or the storage platform wants to be. So a lift usually means the taller track from the raised-ceiling question as well, and the door, the track and the opener are planned together around the lift’s raised height. That number comes off the lift’s spec sheet and is worth having in hand before the door or the opener is ordered.
When it is time to call: opener installation in Dunwoody, two to three hours on the day.