This is a photo of the outside of a house that's painted gray and white. It's a Craftsman-style house with a small front porch.

The Garage is Throwing an Open House Party

This is a photo of the outside of a house that's painted gray and white. It's a Craftsman-style house with a small front porch.

To celebrate a random Wednesday morning, the garage door threw itself a rave party. This “party” involved flashing lights from the overhead mechanical device, loud clicking, and jerky garage door movements that went up and down, and then got stuck in the up position. But did it vomit afterwards? No, I did. My stomach suddenly churned when I realized I might not be able to close the garage door. And here’s what would love to be inside our garage:

  • A bear that I haven’t seen in a while but has been sighted now and then.
  • A bobcat that occasionally stalks the perimeters of the neighborhood.
  • A coyote that runs randomly up and down the streets.
  • Someone’s goat that always gets loose.
  • Stinky feral cats.
  • Someone’s children (armed with spray paint) that wander about at all times of the night.
  • Professional prowlers.

Nate was not home at the time, but Alex was able to push on the button near the wall and force that door down and then back up again so that I could get to an appointment. When I returned, I didn’t dare pull my car into the garage because I wasn’t sure I could get the door back down again.

However, I did text Nate to warn him about the garage door’s sudden “devil may care” attitude.

“Oh, no worries. We can manually override it,” he responded.

“No, really. Don’t open the garage door. Leave your car outside,” I texted.

Nate did not follow my advice, but he did successfully get his car into the garage. Then, he used the garage door opener in his car to lower the door, but that just prompted another rave party in which the garage door tuckered out at the top and had to stop.

And, when Nate tried to just manually lower the door, it wouldn’t go!

“Don’t worry,” Nate said, when he came into the kitchen and saw me eyeing all the large furniture we could shove in front of the gaping garage-shaped hole in front of our house. “I’ve got someone on a chat, and we’re figuring it out now.”

That made me even more scared. Who the heck did he have on a chat that fast? A professional prowler? Did he have to give out our home address? What if the problem couldn’t be solved with a chat? What if it couldn’t be solved for weeks? Months? Would we be taking turns sleeping in the garage to try to scare off wildlife and criminals?

But within maybe forty-five minutes, the problem was solved. Turns out the sensors near the bottom were filled with dust. Just a little glass cleaner was all it took.

Still, I’m cautious. I’d never seen the garage door behave like that before. What are its plans, exactly? Does a “guillotine mode” exist, and is there enough glass cleaner in the world to stop it?

Also, Happy Easter! Luckily, no Easter bunnies were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Your Turn: Do you use videos, a chat, a professional in the field, or an owner’s manual to fix appliances/things you own?

 

 

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Published by ckennedy

Author of the DIY blog: Fixin' Leaks and Leeks. Paper/Rock Writing Consultation, Sole Proprietor.

26 thoughts on “The Garage is Throwing an Open House Party”

  1. YouTube contains a wealth of helpful information. 🙂 i’ve made toilet fixes and how to change windshield wipers and change batteries in an unfamiliar smoke detector.

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  2. I tend to use manuals instead of chats since like you, I’m concerned that I have no idea if I’m even talking to a human (silly me – there’s certainly no human there) and where the information might end up. I had the same thing happen once. It turned out that I had moved a small box in front of the sensor. I agree that it’s not great watching the garage door act like it’s hallucinating!

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  3. I’ve had that happen to me with my garage door. The first time bewildered me and then I worked it out.
    It’s funny how the weirdest things go through your mind when you think you won’t be able to close your garage door.

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  5. Oh boy that was a scary rave that door threw😱I’m glad it was swiftly fixed though.
    I never read instructions when buying some new appliance because they bore me. I usually try all the bottoms till I find the one I need and learn which does what, but when there is an issue my first pic is always YouTube or if available those boot chats that Jaime never seem to help anyway and so back to you tube 🤓

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  7. A bear, a bobcat, and a coyote… Yikes! Our Aussie spiders and snakes have nothing on you… I’m so pleased you got a fix using glass cleaner. Who would have thought? YouTube, in general, helps. My daughter bought me an electric garden saw. I read the instructions then watched a video. This weekend we used it to prune (almost destroy) a backyard tree. It worked great…

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  10. Our English garages tend not to be big enough to even fit a modern car in, but they are great for storing everything and as a workshop. We never had an electric door, much more fun unlocking it and giving a nudge hoping it would spring up. Once it got a broken spring…. The best thing we did was turn our garage into an extra room!

    I usually avoid fixing things, isn’t that what fathers, brothers, husbands, sons and neighbours are for? But my daughter can fix things – she says her husband has emotional intelligence, that means he doesn’t know how to fix things….

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    1. We used to live in a house that didn’t have an automatic garage door, so we had to manually lift it each time, and it was 100% made of wood. I nearly threw my back out each time–it was so heavy! That was back when we were young. I don’t think we could do that now.

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