Start with the door you have
Three different jobs get described with the same sentence, and only one of them ends with a new door going into the opening. Read the line that sounds like your garage and go where it points.
If there is still a repair in that door, the honest answer is a repair, and we would rather point you at garage door repair than move you toward a new door you did not need. If you cannot tell which of the three you are in, that is a normal place to be, and a callback is a better place to sort it out than a search box. Say what the door is doing and we start there.
The four situations that lead to a new garage door
Garage door installation comes out of four fairly different situations, and from inside the house they do not feel like the same thing at all.
The first is age. A door that has been going up and down for years can start failing in more than one place at once. Nothing dramatic happens. You just notice you have stopped expecting it to work.
The second is damage past repair. A vehicle meets the bottom section. A storm bends the whole assembly instead of one piece of it. Something falls on it. At some point a door with a broken part becomes a broken door, and the person who tells you which one you have should be somebody standing in front of it.
The third is a remodel. The garage is turning into a room, or the front of the house is being redone and the door is part of the elevation. Here the door is a design decision that happens to be mechanical, and it has to land at a particular point in somebody else’s schedule.
The fourth is the door doing its job badly rather than not at all. Noise. A door that has never sealed at the floor. Appearance. Insulation.
We do not rank those four and we do not decide which one you are in. What the callback does is get the right kind of professional pointed at the right kind of project, so that the first conversation is not spent discovering that you were describing two different jobs.
And if what you have turns out to be one failed part on a door that is otherwise fine, we will say so, and garage door repair is where that starts.
What we look up before an installer gets your job
Anybody can print “licensed and insured” on the side of a van, and standing in your driveway you have no way to tell. Florida keeps records in public. The Department of Business and Professional Regulation runs a license database that anyone is free to search.
So we search it. For the individual professional who would be handed your job, we run the search, we read what comes back exactly as it stands, and we do it before the handoff, never after. The lookup is the step that comes first.
The method is deliberately narrow, and it is worth being exact about what it is not. We do not grade the professional. We do not speak for a trade as a whole. We do not treat four different trades as one thing. We tell you what the record says, and we do not tell you a record exists when it does not.
You can run the same search yourself. That is what a public record is for. We run it every time so that it is already done by the time you are talking to somebody about your door.
What the callback asks about your opening
A door is measured before it is chosen, and the measuring is about the opening rather than about the door. So the callback is short and it is mostly questions about your garage.
Roughly how wide the opening is. Whether it is one wide door or two singles. How much room there is above the opening and to each side of it. Whether the ceiling in there is finished or open. Whether the garage is attached to the house. What the current door is made of, if you happen to know.
Rough answers are fine, and “I do not know” is an answer. You do not need to be holding a tape measure while you fill out a form. The point of asking early is that the person who eventually comes out arrives expecting the opening you actually have.
If the motor is the part that stopped working, or you already have an opener you plan to keep, that is worth saying up front: garage door opener repair covers the opener, the remote, and the sensors, and it is worth ruling that out before anyone talks to you about a new door.
Three things worth asking before the door is ordered
A garage door in Florida can come with a paperwork conversation — wind load, permits, product approval. We are not the right party to answer it for you and we are not going to pretend to be. What we can do is tell you what to ask, so that the question gets asked at the beginning instead of after a door is already on a truck.
Ask about wind load, and ask what the answer means for the door you are considering.
Ask whether the job needs a permit and who is the one who pulls it.
Ask whether the door comes with product approval paperwork, and if so, who hands it to you when the work is done.
All three are worth raising in the first conversation, in writing if you can.
What we do not decide for you
There are four things this page will not do, and it is better that you know them now than find out on the callback.
We do not price the work. We have no number to give you, and any number we invented would be worse than no number at all.
We do not recommend a brand, a model, or a material. That belongs to the conversation with the person who will hang the door, in front of the opening, with your house behind them.
We do not tell you how long it takes. That depends on the door, on the opening, and on things neither of us can see from here.
And we do not tell you whether to repair or replace. That is a judgment made by somebody looking at the door, not by a form.
What we do is narrower and, we think, more useful: we take what you tell us, we look up the public record on the professional who would take the job, and we report what it says.
Free for homeowners
You do not pay CheckedCrew. Not to fill out the form, not for the callback, not for the match. Any price for the door and the work comes from the professional who does it, not from us. We do not set that price, we do not quote it, and we do not take a cut of your invoice.
Where we work
CheckedCrew serves Orlando, Florida. If your property sits outside the city, put the ZIP code in the form anyway and we will tell you straight on the callback whether we can help with it.
What Orlando homeowners ask before they buy a garage door
