Day Three: The Garage Door

Happy July 4th!!!

Today's goal was simple:  fix the broken garage door!!!

When I purchased the house, the garage door was in quite a bit of need.  First of all, part of the door hung in towards the garage.  That fix was easy to spot:  it was missing a guide wheel.  Thankfully, Dad had several laying around from our dumpster diving last year with the trommel project!

So that was a simple $0 fix.

But the next problem was that the door didn't even have cables to raise and lower it!  So I purchased a set at Menard's and watched YouTube videos on how to fix it!  Ha!  But I'm serious.  I am pretty handy, but I don't know everything.  But after watching the videos, I felt prepared for the task at hand!

The garage door was missing cables on both the left and the right!

Dad and I met at 9:00 again this morning, and we went to work.  It wasn't exactly perfectly simple.  While I was able to get the cables on, I still had too much slack in the door.  It was kind of trial-and-error (emphasis on error), but we concluded that I needed to have more tension on the cable.  So I used Vise-grips and spun the torsion bar around and then hooked up the cables to the bottom of the door.  Voila!

Problem fixed!!!

Sort of.  We noticed that the track on the right side was waaaaaaaaay out of alignment.  So I removed the supporting brace and moved it over a few holes up by the ceiling.  Now that the track was lined up, the roller arms wouldn't fall out!  It was a small yet necessary fix.

We plugged the opener in and tried it out.  It would only go down a few inches, then come back up.  Hmmm.  But it was trying to move.  I tried again.  Same.  Again.  Same.  One of my tenants had this problem, and the fix was to make sure the eye sensors were lining up.

Well, wouldn't you know it, one of the sensors was completely missing?!  So I held down the garage door button, and the garage door went down smoothly!!!  Woo-hoo!!!  I pushed it again, and the door went up smoothly!!!  Woo-hoo!!!

So I need a new set of eyes.  But that is totally doable!  I had budgeted $600 for this fix when I purchased this house (planning to use a garage door contractor), and I am in it for just over $7!  So I was wildly excited about that!

That was our only goal today!  And we did it!

We broke early so that we could enjoy the rest of the holiday off.  A good day.

Sort of.  This morning before I took a shower, I put a load of laundry in.  Not 10 minutes later, I was upstairs and heard a pop and heard the dryer shut off.  Hmm.  After showering, I tried it out.  It was dead.

So tonight, I decided to take apart the dryer to figure out what was wrong.  It had been fairly loud recently, so I figured a roller finally gave way and stopped it from spinning easy.  Well, I took off the cover and felt the rollers.  They felt perfect.  Hmm.  So I looked around.

The joys of home-ownership!

And that's when I saw a wire in the bottom that had fried itself free!  I cut the wire, replaced the old, charred connector with new and was back in business for free!  I tested out the dryer, and not only did it work fine, but it was not quieter, too!  ha!  A win-win.
Things break.  Any home-owner knows that, and any landlord knows that even more.  But I was happy to be back in business at the cost of only an hour.

The black wire in foreground had charred itself away from the connector in background and arced on the heating element.  Thankfully, the circuit-breaker tripped.

Back in business!