01 Services
Fifteen services, each with its own page, because a snapped torsion spring and a warped bottom panel on a 1920s wood door have nothing in common except the building they are in.
01 How to use this page
Most people arrive here knowing what the door is doing, not what has failed. That is fine — the symptom is usually enough to point you at the right page.
If the door will not lift at all and the opener strains or clicks, start with broken spring repair. If it lifts unevenly or hangs crooked, look at cable repair. If it came off its rollers, go straight to off-track doors and stop using the opener. If it is loud, noisy door repair will usually name the sound. If the motor runs but nothing moves, that is opener repair — although in this market it is more often a spring.
Not sure? Call. Describing the noise and what the door does at which point in its travel is normally enough for us to narrow it to two possibilities before we leave the shop.
02 The full list
Grouped the way a technician thinks about them: whole-door work, the individual components that fail, and the two property types that need genuinely different hardware.
The general call. Something has failed and the door will not behave. We diagnose the whole balanced system rather than replacing the first broken thing we see, because in this housing stock one failure usually has a cause behind it.
Read moreNew doors on old openings, including the eight- and nine-foot pre-war sizes that catalogue installers avoid. We measure headroom, backroom and side clearance before quoting anything.
Read moreWhen repeat repairs stop making sense. We give you the honest arithmetic — what the repair costs, what it buys you in years, and where the line sits for your particular door.
Read moreThe most common failure in a Chicago-area winter. Torsion and extension springs sized to your door's real weight and cycle needs, not to whatever is cheapest on the shelf.
Read moreMotor hums and nothing lifts, door reverses a foot from the floor, remote works but the wall control does not. Most openers are worth repairing; we will tell you when yours is not.
Read moreChain, belt and wall-mount jackshaft openers. The last of those matters here — old detached garages often have no ceiling space to give a rail and motor.
Read moreStuck open, off track, spring gone with a bang, car trapped. Call and you get an honest answer about when a truck can be there, not a scripted promise.
Read moreLift cables fray for months before they snap. When one goes, the door drops on one side and puts the whole assembly out of level. Fast to fix, dangerous to ignore.
Read moreWorn steel rollers are the leading cause of a garage door that wakes the street. Nylon replacements are cheap, quick, and the single best value repair on a door.
Read moreBent, spread or out of plumb. Bumpers cause some of it; in Evanston's alley garages, a settling slab causes a surprising amount of the rest.
Read moreOne damaged section on a door that is otherwise sound. Worth doing on a newer door; often not worth it on an old one, and we will say which yours is.
Read moreThe urgent one. A door off its rollers is carrying its weight somewhere it was not designed to. Stop using the opener and call before it moves further.
Read moreGrinding, squealing, banging, or a single loud pop near the top of travel. Each noise points at a specific component, and most are cheap to fix early.
Read moreDetached alley garages, attached two-car garages, coach houses and above-garage ADUs. Four different buildings that need four different approaches.
Read moreCondo parking decks, west-side loading bays, rolling steel shutters on Howard Street and Dempster, and gate operators. Higher cycles, heavier hardware, different service intervals.
Read more03 What every job includes
Springs, cables, drums, rollers, hinges, track alignment, opener force and travel limits, and both safety sensors. Not just the part that broke.
A cable that snapped after two years usually snapped because a drum is worn or the door is out of level. Replacing the cable alone buys you two more years of the same.
You get the fault, what fixing it involves, what it costs, and what the cheaper and more expensive versions of that look like. Then you choose.
Auto-reverse checked against an obstruction, photo-eyes aligned and tested, force settings left where they belong. Per DASMA guidance, not turned up to mask a problem.
04 Parts
Most residential repairs in this market come down to a short list of parts, so we carry them rather than ordering them.
05 Questions we get asked
One call reaches the people who will actually be doing the work. Tell us what the door is doing and we will tell you straight what it needs — and when we can get a truck to you.
