5 Things to Do If You Crash Your Car Into Your Garage Door

Posted on: 5 May 2017

If you've backed your car into your garage door, you are not alone. This is a relatively common occurrence, but unfortunately, depending on how hard you hit the door, it can have a range of consequences. Here's what you need to do if it happens.

1. Check If the Opening Mechanism Works

After you have got your car back into its regular parking spot and turned it off, you should check to see if the automatic garage door opener still works. If the opener makes straining noises and the door refuses to move, disable the automatic opener and try to open the door manually.

Don't force open the door. Just try to pull it open. If you can't get it open, try to close it.

2. Look for Bent Tracks

In most cases, when you hit a garage door, the door itself gets damaged, but all that pressure can also damage the tracks supporting your garage door. Look them over for visible signs of damage. If you can't tell if they are damaged or not, grab a level that works vertically, and run it up and down the tracks. Any place that the level does not read as level is damaged and likely needs to be repaired.

Gently with a mallet, you can attempt to straighten any bent track, and then, you may want to try opening the garage door again.

3. Call a Professional

At this point, if you cannot get out of the garage, you may want to contact a professional. First, if your car is still stranded behind your garage door, you need a professional taxi driver to get you where you are going.

Of course, you also need a professional garage door repair person. They can help you with opening the door, fixing tracks and replacing springs, and if necessary, they can also help with putting in a new garage door.

4. Reinforce the Broken Door

Once a garage door repair person has helped to get your door mobile, you may want to reinforce the broken door. If you like DIY, you can do this on your own, or you can have the garage door professional do it for you.

Basically, you add small steel struts to each section of the garage door. That keeps the door stable when in use. However, it doesn't fix the look of the door.

5. Contact Your Insurers

To cover the cost of the garage door repairs or replacements, you may want to contact your insurance company. Depending on your excess, your home or car insurer may cover some of those costs.

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