This was an unexpectedly big project – for some reason I’d thought I could buy myself a garage door opener, install it, and be done in a day. HAH, I say to my naive self a week later. I did buy it without any complications, and then assembled it on the floor of my garage. At that point, I realized this was going to be a bigger job, so I did the rest over the course of the week.

First, I had to tighten my garage door springs – there’s a lovely pictogram on the instructions, showing someone raising a garage door halfway, lettiing go, and the garage door staying still. My garage door, when I let go, thumped to the ground with a resounding thump. Luckily, I have an old-fashioned door with springs on both sides, not a torsion spring in the middle, which evidently requires a professional. My springs just required me to raise the door to take the weight off them and then tie the cables a bit tighter. And when I lifted the door, not only was it easier to lift, when I let go at the halfway point, it obediently stayed still.

Just assembling the door opener had gotten me to page 13 of the 30-page instruction manual, at which point, it suddenly announced that my garage door would need to be reinforced so the opener didn’t bend it in half by having all of the force at one point. So that was the the first extra hardware store trip, to buy a large angle bracket to attach across the top of the door for reinforcement.

And then the header bracket had to be attached, 2 inches above the highest point the door travels to. While this was still on the wall, not up in the ceiling, there wasn’t any wall there – my garage door header stops about an inch before the ceiling starts, leaving me nowhere to attach the bracket. This required a call to my dad to see if he had a 2×4 that I could use to bridge the gap. My dad is my first source for scrap lumber, rather than automatically buying wood – he tends to have useful bits, and indeed, he had a 2×4 that I could take. So after attaching the 2×4, I had a spot to install the header bracket.

A bit further in the instructions, I needed to hang the actual opener from the basement rafters. This is simple if it happens to be straight under a rafter, or if your rafters run parallel to the opener. My rafters, of course, run perpendicular, and the opener fell precisely between two of them. So I had to acquire two extra hangers, and the appropriate bolts to attach them to the opener and to the ceiling. Of course, this required two trips to the hardware store, on two separate days.

Then there was the wiring of the push button next to the door, and the safety sensors that keep the door from closing if there’s something in the way – a cat, child, or the back end of my car. I was all excited because I got the sensors installed on the wall – the secondary option, since they couldn’t snap onto the track because the bottom bracket of my door would run into them.

And then I got to plug in the opener and push the button. And my door went up! It was really exciting! And then I pushed the button again, and the door went down… and just as it got to the bottom, went back up again. And then I realized that the bottom bracket of my door was setting off the safety sensors as it went in front of them. So the sensors would have to be installed off the wall a couple inches. So I called my dad for a pair of short 2x4s to bring the sensors forward enough to not be affected by the bracket, and he, being the useful dad he is, brought them to me, and I re-installed the sensors.

And then I pushed the button, and the door went down and stayed there, and I pushed the button again and it went up, and then I pushed the button a couple more times just to revel in my power. And now I get to park my car indoors, and confuse my cats by coming in and out a door I’ve hardly used before now. Awesome.