The two people who started this, and why

Nate Sorensen grew up on the south side of Evanston, in a brick two-flat with a garage at the back of the lot and an alley that turned to soup every spring.

That garage had a wooden door his father fought with for twenty years. Eight-foot opening, maybe six feet of headroom to the rafters, one spring, and a bottom rail that sat in standing water every time it rained hard. By the time Nate was old enough to help, the routine was familiar: lift, swear, shoulder it, prop it with a broom handle.

He got into the trade at nineteen, and by his late twenties he was a lead installer for a large door company headquartered up in the northwest suburbs. The work was steady and the money was fine. What bothered him was the dispatch board. New construction in Glenview and beyond — clean sixteen-by-seven openings, level slabs, generous headroom — got the trucks. A 1924 detached garage in Evanston with a nonstandard opening got a shrug, a padded quote, or a call back that never came.

He had grown up behind one of those garages. He knew exactly how many of them there were.

Chris and the commercial side

Chris Duvall came at it from the other direction. Ten years on commercial overhead doors and gate operators — parking-deck sectionals, warehouse loading bays, rolling steel shutters on retail strips. Bigger hardware, tighter tolerances, and customers who lose money by the hour when a door stops working.

The two of them met on a job in 2008 where a condo association downtown had been sold a residential opener for a parking-deck door that cycled sixty times a day. It failed inside a year, exactly as anyone with commercial experience would have predicted. They spent an afternoon talking about how often that kind of thing happens, and how little of it is the customer's fault.

Three years later they signed a lease on Brown Avenue.

Why the shop is where it is

1033 Brown Avenue is not a glamorous address. It sits in Evanston's west-side working belt, two blocks west of Dodge Avenue and a block and a half north of Main Street, a short run from the Robert Crown Center and about half a mile from the North Shore Channel that separates us from Skokie.

It was chosen for one reason: from here, Dempster Street runs straight west into Skokie and Morton Grove, Green Bay Road runs straight north through Wilmette, Kenilworth and Winnetka, and Ridge Avenue runs straight south into Rogers Park and Edgewater. Almost everywhere we serve is a single arterial and under ten road miles away. That is the only honest basis for promising anyone same-day service.

"Locally owned" is on every trade website in America, so it is worth saying what it changes.

It means we know that Kenilworth was platted in 1889 with no alleys as a founding principle, so every garage there is reached from the street and street-facing door openings are capped by village code. It means we know Winnetka's code limits an individual front-facing garage door to nine feet wide, which is why so many Winnetka two-car garages have two separate doors instead of one wide one — and why ordering a sixteen-foot door for one is a wasted afternoon.

It means we know that the north end of Central Street has alley-facing garage doors painted as murals, that the Fifth Ward's alleys are narrow enough to matter when you are backing a van in, and that the Lakeshore Historic District contains 501 detached garages, 31 coach houses and 20 barns because the City counted them.

Mostly it means we are not going to sell a Glencoe homeowner with a David Adler house a stamped steel raised-panel door, or tell a Rogers Park landlord with a 1920s frame garage that they need the same product as a 2004 Glenview subdivision. Those are different buildings with different problems.

Community

We sponsor a youth team most seasons, we take calls from neighbours who just want to know whether something is dangerous, and we do not charge to tell someone over the phone that their door is safe to keep using until Monday. Small things. But it is the difference between a business that lives in a place and one that has a pin on a map there.

What we are still working on

Honest answer: scheduling in January. When a cold snap hits, half of Evanston's springs decide to fail on the same three days, and there is no amount of planning that makes a two-van shop into a six-van shop for a week. We tell people the truth about the queue rather than booking a slot we cannot keep. If that costs us a job occasionally, it is the right trade.