The Creation of the Customized Wood Garage Door
The modern day Garage is an evolution of the earlier day legendary Carriage House which housed horses and carriages alike. The openings to these carriage houses or modernly known garages were closed off with standard swinging carriage house doors with a barn-like appearance sometimes with windows on the top panel. These two-leaf carriage house doors soon became the norm for custom-built carriage houses all across the country. Heavy but decorative iron hinges, iron knockers, and iron handles were often implemented for functionality purposes but soon became quite decorative and used to add character to these appealing decorative garage doors. As time went by and with the creation and availability of automobiles to the general public; the carriage house or garage began its evolution into what we now know as automobile garages.
So now that carriage houses had emerged into garages, there came the need for a more conventional and at the time “a more contemporary” transformation for garage doors. Sure, carriage house garage doors were beautiful and serviceable for their original intended use; the problem with carriage house two-leaf doors became evident as they were used more and more. The traditional hardware and strap hinges were not proving to be up to par with the new demands and uses of the customary carriage house garage door. Soon screws became lose, hinges broke, the whole structure of the door was not made to withstand the new use they were supposed to satisfy. To compel to these problems, Shoveling snow for hours just to open the carriage door. Although swinging barn-like doors were borrowed from the original carriage house styles it soon became evident that the old barn way was not going to cut it for the use of a garage.
The 1st attempt at alleviating this garage door problem was the creation of sliding tracks for carriage house garage doors, more useful garage door designs were created. Doors that slide took a lot less space if the doors could stay within the garage space so that, on a sliding door track, garage doors could be moved from side to side, across the front part of the garage facility. This meant that the garage would have had to be at least twice the width of the garage door. Another improvement was still needed and it came in the form of a garage door that was cut into several sections (parts/pieces), then connected with hinges together at intervals this allowed the garage door to fold around a corner. This invention facilitated everything because the garage didn’t need to be much wider than the door itself.
