Fitting a modern door to a 1920s Evanston garage

Roughly four in ten Evanston homes were built before 1940, and the garages behind them were sized for cars that stopped being made a long time ago. If you are trying to fit a modern door into a narrow 1920s garage door opening, the width is usually the easy part. Headroom is what stops jobs.

Why so many Evanston openings are eight or nine feet wide

The number that explains this town: 40.3% of Evanston's housing units were built before 1940, and another 29.9% between 1940 and 1969 — figures from CMAP's Evanston community data snapshot. Seven in ten homes here predate 1970.

A garage built behind a 1920s bungalow was built for one car, and that car was about five and a half feet wide. The opening got framed at eight feet, occasionally nine, with a header just deep enough to span it and the roof structure starting more or less immediately above. Where a lot got a two-car garage, it very often got two eight-foot openings with a post between them rather than one sixteen-foot opening — a sixteen-foot header in 1926 was expensive timber, and a post was free.

The same pattern runs through the Oakton district south of Main Street, across west Evanston, down through south Evanston and straight over Howard Street into Rogers Park and Edgewater, where the frame garage at the rear lot line is the standard Chicago arrangement. One continuous belt of the same building decade, and it does not stop at the city line.

Measure your own opening before you call anybody

Four measurements. None needs a ladder if you have a tape you can run overhead, though a torch helps for the ceiling one. Do it with the door closed, and measure the opening — never the door. The door may already be the wrong size. That is often why you are reading this.

1. Opening width. Measure between the inside faces of the two wood jambs — not between the edges of the existing door, and not across the outside of the trim. Take it three times: near the floor, at waist height, and as high as you can reach. On an eighty-year-old garage these are frequently not the same number. Keep the smallest, because that is the one the door has to clear.

2. Opening height. Floor to the underside of the header, taken at the left jamb and again at the right jamb. Two numbers again, for the same reason. Most doors around here are seven feet or six feet six.

3. Headroom. From the top of the opening straight up to the lowest thing in the way — ceiling, joist, rafter tie, collar tie, light fitting, conduit, the underside of a storage loft. The lowest obstruction within the first eighteen inches back from the wall is the one that counts. This number decides everything else.

4. Backroom and side room. Backroom runs from the face of the opening straight back to the rear wall or the first obstruction. Side room runs from each jamb sideways to the wall, or to the nearest thing screwed to it. Measure both sides — they are rarely equal, because somebody mounted a panel or a shelf bracket on one of them in 1974.

What each measurement actually decides

Headroom and side room requirements shift with track and spring configuration, so treat them as numbers to report, not a pass-or-fail test you apply yourself. Your job is the tape measure. The arithmetic is ours.

When headroom is short: three real answers

Short headroom is the most common single reason an Evanston garage still has its original door. It is also the most solvable problem on this list.

Low-headroom track kits

The standard arrangement wants roughly a foot above the opening so the torsion shaft, the drums and the curve of the horizontal track all have somewhere to live. A low-headroom kit rearranges that. Two approaches do most of the work: a double horizontal track, where the top rollers run in their own separate upper track so the radius of the curve can be tightened, and a reverse-angle mount, where the shaft sits behind the header rather than in front of it.

Between those two, a competent installer can work in as little as about four and a half inches — less than the depth of a two-by-four laid flat.

The trade-offs are honest ones. More parts means more to adjust and more to keep lubricated, and a double-track setup is fussier about a door that is out of square — which matters on an old garage. A standard ceiling-rail opener may also have nowhere sensible left to mount, which leads straight to the next option.

A wall-mount jackshaft opener

This is the option that changes the most jobs. Instead of a motor on the ceiling pulling a trolley along a rail, a jackshaft unit bolts to the wall beside the opening and drives the torsion shaft directly. No rail, no ceiling unit, no rail-length demand on backroom at all.

You get the entire ceiling back — storage, a bike lift, or simply opening the door without a rail four inches above the roof of a tall vehicle. What it needs is a torsion system on a shaft: a jackshaft cannot drive a door on extension springs, so if yours still runs on springs stretched along the horizontal tracks, converting to torsion is part of the job. It also drives load through the end bearing plates and shaft, so those must be sound — on a rusty setup they get replaced with the springs. Opener installation on this kind of garage is a different conversation from a suburban attached garage.

Re-heading the opening

Sometimes the header itself is the obstruction: the framing above the door is deeper than it needs to be, and moving it up would buy the inches. Re-heading means temporarily supporting whatever the wall carries, opening the cladding and interior finish, pulling the old header, installing one sized for the span and the load above, and rebuilding the jack studs and king studs at each end. Real carpentry, permit work, and not our trade — we work alongside the carpenter.

When it is not worth doing: when the gain is two or three inches that a low-headroom kit would have absorbed anyway; when the rafters bear directly at the top plate so there is nothing above the header to move into; and when the building is far enough out of square that you would be fixing the wrong problem.

Widening an opening is a structural job, not a door job

People ask for this most often when they want one sixteen-foot double where two eight-foot singles are now. Entirely doable. Just not a garage door decision.

Removing the post between two singles removes a bearing point. Whatever that post held — usually the front of the roof structure — then has to be carried by a new header spanning the full width, with proper bearing at each end, adequate jack studs, and something solid under those studs. On a detached garage with a shallow footing, that last point is not automatic.

Widening from eight feet to nine is a far smaller exercise than going to sixteen, and for a lot of households it is enough. A nine-foot opening takes a modern crossover comfortably. An eight-foot one is a mirror-folding proposition.

Either way, expect to pull a permit — structural alteration to a detached accessory building is permit work. Check current requirements with the City through Evanston's permit information before you commit, because codes and fee schedules change. And if the garage sits in the Lakeshore, Ridge or Northeast Evanston districts, a Certificate of Appropriateness covers permitted exterior work visible from a public way — and an alley is a public way. That is not a refusal. It means calling 311 before you order rather than after. More on that in our guide to permits and historic review in Evanston; the City's historic preservation pages are the authority, not us.

Header and jamb condition on an eighty-year-old garage

Here is the part nobody thinks about until the new door is sitting in the alley. Almost none of the door hardware bolts to the header. End bearing plates, vertical track brackets and flag angles all bolt to the jambs — the vertical wood members either side of the opening. Those jambs have spent eighty or a hundred years an inch above a slab that gets wet, and in an unpaved-alley garage they have been splashed every spring.

What we look for before quoting a replacement:

• Soft wood in the bottom eighteen inches of each jamb. Push a screwdriver in. If it sinks, the fixings for the vertical track have nothing to hold — a safety problem, not a cosmetic one.
• Sag in the header. Run a string line across the underside of the opening. A quarter-inch over eight feet is common and usually fine. Half an inch wants a look.
• An undersized original header. A pair of two-by-sixes over an eight-foot opening was once standard practice and is often still standing perfectly well. What it will not tolerate is a torsion spring anchor hung off it without thought.
• Previous surgery. Old lag holes, packing shims, a header that has clearly been messed with. Each one is a story about the last door.

Where the jambs have gone but the structure is sound, replacing the jamb boards is a normal part of a door installation — an hour or two, not a week. Where the header has failed, that is carpentry first, door second.

Should you keep the original wood door?

Sometimes, genuinely, yes. If you have an intact pair of hinged carriage doors or an early sliding wood door on a contributing building in a historic district, the original is worth keeping and worth maintaining. It will never be as convenient as a sectional, and it will never look like anything else on the block.

If what you have is a wood sectional — hinged panels running in track, which is what most Evanston garages actually have — the calculation is different. Wood sectionals are heavy, and weight is what eats springs and openers. They swell through a Chicago July, when dew points sit at seventy degrees or above for a dozen days, and shrink again in January. That seasonal movement is why the door sticks in August and rattles in February.

Three sane paths:

1. Repair what you have. If two sections are rotten and the rest is sound, section replacement on a wood door is possible, but it depends entirely on what can still be matched.
2. Replace with a steel sectional in a carriage style. You keep the look from the alley, gain rigidity, and lose roughly half the weight. For most 1920s garages we work on, this is the right answer.
3. Replace like for like in wood. Appropriate in a historic district, more expensive, and it needs re-finishing on a schedule.

Whichever you choose, the springs are sized to the door's measured weight, never to a table. A wood door and a steel door of the same size are nowhere near the same load, and a replacement that reuses old springs on a lighter door will be back inside a year.

That list changes every answer you get afterwards. It is also how you tell whether the person on the phone knows this housing stock: ask what headroom you have, and see whether they already know why the question matters.

If you would rather we did the measuring, call (224) 505-2236 and say it is an old garage with a narrow opening. That tells us to load the low-headroom track and bring a longer tape.

Frequently asked questions