A Rough Guide To Garage Doors
When preparing to install or replace a garage, you have a basic choice between three material types: metal, wood and synthetic.
Metal (mostly commonly steel, but also aluminum) is used to make well over three quarters of the garage doors sold these days. It is both relatively light and low maintenance, but suffers from being easy to dent or deform.
Wooden garage doors on the other hand are heavier and generally more expensive, especially if made from solid timber, but “composite wood” doors manufactured from laminates or recycled wood fiber do address both these issues. The principle advantages of wood garage doors are that they look considerably nicer, can (if properly maintained) outlast their rivals, and are far more amenable to customization and matching existing architectural features.
Synthetic doors are usually molded vinyl or fiber-glass and are the lightest of the three. They tend to be more robust than metal doors in standing up to everyday knocks and scrapes but these materials do break down eventually due to exposure to ultra violet light, presenting something of an environmentally unfriendly disposal problem when they do so.