We’ve all done it. You put together your new Ikea desk and find out that you have an extra washer or an extra screw. The desk seems sturdy enough, though. The drawers don’t fall out. You assume everything is OK. You assume that the manufacturer includes extra pieces just in case you drop one down the furnace grate or something. Maybe someday in the future you are moving or giving the desk away. You take the desk apart again and somewhere back in the back you find a hole with no screw. Clearly it wasn’t important in the first place. And that’s good to know since you’ve long since lost the screw anyway. No harm. No foul. It was just a little screw. What’s the worst that could have happened? It’s not like it was tasked with keeping say a massive garage door from falling on your head, right?
Speaking of garage doors. (and we were, right?) Recently we’ve been having some issues with ours. Before I elaborate, let me clarify that we do not keep our car in our detached garage. Never have. We are not opening and closing the door several times a day coming and going from work or the grocery store. We don’t enter the house that way like we did in California. It’s a storage room, a tool room, and a work room. As such, if we have to, we can tolerate having to manually open or close the door as needed which, in fact, we had to do when the bolt that holds the arm to the opener rusted out and fell away. No big deal except that when we went to re-secure it we noticed that it had been installed backwards….12 years ago. But obviously it had been working so we invoked the no harm, no foul rule and moved on with our life.
Well, now that I think of it, we did replace it in the proper orientation. And maybe in retrospect that was our first mistake because next thing we knew one of the cables started slipping. It would slip. Michael would fix it. It would slip again. The door would tweak off balance. The wheels would bind. And the process would repeat itself. It hasn’t worked right for weeks now. We’ve had to push it up and pull it down without even the benefit of working cables. Michael has nearly lost two fingers in the process. So something needed to be done. I did a youtube search for videos on ‘how to balance your garage door’ but the cautions about using special winding bars to safely adjust the tension on the massive spring kind of turned me off to the prospect of a DIY project.
The electrician was here on Saturday for a different headache. So Michael asked him if he knew anyone who knew how to fix garage doors. He called a friend and they spent hours doing pretty much what Michael had done without any better results. Michael sent them away. We tried to call the guy who installed the door way back when. No luck. We finally got the name and number of another guy who’s done work for a friend. He came by on Monday and looked at the door.
(photo: inside of door, loose cable on top right, abandoned rickety ladder in forefront)
Right off of the bat he was baffled.
“Well, the first thing is that a door this door size should have TWO springs.”
Two springs, you say? Not just that one big one? Really? Two?
So Michael (and remember Michael is a guy and guys never seem to know where they’ve left even the most common, everyday items) goes immediately behind the garage to the generator room, rummages around, comes back, and says, “like this one?”
Apparently, this other huge, mongo spring was left lying about when the garage door was originally installed 13 years ago….back when everything was being installed in the house and we had moutains of spare parts piling up around us. So we can forgive Michael for accepting the concept of having an extra backup spring for the garage door….especially given that (1) it has worked up until now and (2) he did have the presence of mind to keep the spare.
No harm. No foul.
(At least assuming that once the guy comes back to install the second spring we don’t find out that it is ‘shelf-spoiled’ and the garage door finally works again. We’ll see.)
