Month: December 2018

It’s that time of year again. We’ve put up our tree, our wreath, our many [many] lights. The tree is lit, the house is lit, the whole neighborhood is lit. It’s nice to admire our beautiful handiwork from the front yard. It’s nice to come home after work to our beautiful well-lit house. It’s nice to—hold up… Why isn’t the garage door opening? Why isn’t the remote opening the door? Guess the universe wanted you to have a little more time to admire your beautiful decor.

Just when you thought you were finished fighting with the lights… Truth is, all those beautiful holiday decorations can play havoc on the garage door opener. It runs on a radio frequency and all kinds of things that you wouldn’t expect can suddenly interfere with your remote opening your door—anything from a new refrigerator to that darling inflatable Frosty in the front yard to your neighbor’s new surround sound. Radio waves can travel pretty far, run into plenty of things, and then stop.

So, if your remote suddenly stopped working [or started working very sporadically], you might want to evaluate what changed inside your house. Try unplugging a few of those new decorations. If you still can’t get the remote to behave, come on down to A.B.E. Doors and Windows, where we can test the frequency your remote is sending and you can admire our lights while you wait.

You have enough to worry about with the holidays coming. Let us take care of the garage!

This post first appeared on https://www.abedoors.com

Caring for the garage is an important yet often neglected aspect of home maintenance. While most people care for and maintain the rest of the house, they usually fail to think of caring for and maintaining the garage, and all of the benefits doing so brings. In addition to increasing your home’s curb appeal, a well-maintained garage can help make your home more energy efficient and provide a valuable space for out-of-the-ordinary projects, like woodworking, music making or other creative endeavors.

Garage care isn’t complicated, expensive or much of a hassle, especially when done regularly. If you make time for some light garage maintenance, you will thank yourself later when you catch small issues like a crack in the foundation or a failing garage door before they become serious and turn into a costly inconvenience. Here are a few simple things you can do to keep your garage in tip-top shape.

Keep It Clean

Great in theory, difficult in practice, keeping your garage organized and clean is the first step to garage maintenance. If your garage is tidy, fixing other problems becomes a breeze, because you will have plenty of room to work on the issues. Everybody has their own methods of organization, but it’s important that you pick one and stick to it. Once you get into the habit of neglecting your garage’s cleanliness, it won’t be long before you realize you have so much stuff lying around that you can hardly walk from one side to the other, let alone park your car in it or use the space for a creative project.

Fix Deep Floor Cracks

Because garage floors are usually made of large concrete slabs and the temperature inside garages fluctuates greatly depending on the season, the floors are likely to crack as they expand and contract with the weather. Cracked garage floors are easiest to fix as soon as they happen because the cracks are small and shallow. If left unchecked, they will get bigger, which brings with it a variety of problems.

Stop the Drafts

All this step entails is to seal all of the small cracks in your doors and windows so that less cold air blows into the garage. This will help regulate the temperature inside the garage, which will make it more comfortable to be in, help prevent the floor from cracking, and reduce the chances of pests getting inside. Replacing the gasket on the bottom of the garage door, placing weatherstripping around any other doors and adding some extra caulking around the windows is all it will take to fix this problem.

This post first appeared on https://utahgaragedoors.net