When a door is genuinely finished
Most garage doors that get replaced did not need to be. A door that opens and closes, with a sound frame and intact panels, is a door worth keeping, and a great deal of what is sold as replacement in Cape Town is a service that was skipped for a decade. So the first thing to say about installation is that it starts with an honest look at the door you have, and the answer is often a spring, a motor or a panel rather than a new door.
A door is finished when the panels have rusted through — common on the coast, where a steel sectional in Milnerton or Sea Point can be perforated inside eight years. When a timber tip-up has rotted at the bottom rail and the pivot points, which the Southern Suburbs produce every winter. When a panel door has had more panels replaced than it has original, and the profile no longer matches. And when the cost of the next repair is more than about a third of a new door, which is the line where repair stops making sense. If your door is on the right side of that line, this page is not for you yet, and we will say so.
Measured to the opening you actually have
A new door is not chosen from a catalogue and made to fit. It is measured — the width and height of the opening, the headroom above it, the side room either side, the depth of the garage back from the opening, and the state of the lintel and the jambs — and then the door type and size follow from those numbers. Cape Town garages are not standard. City Bowl garages cut into a slope may have a metre of headroom on one side and nothing on the other. Older Southern Suburbs garages were built for cars two sizes smaller than today's. Northern Suburbs double garages are wide and often lower than the door the developer specified.
That is why the measurement happens on site and the quote follows it, rather than the other way round. A sectional door needs ceiling tracks and headroom; a roll-up door needs neither but does need a barrel above the opening; a tip-up door needs clearance in front of the garage for the panel to swing out. Which one a garage can actually take is a measurement, not a preference, and the preference comes second.
The three types, in one paragraph each
Sectional doors are horizontal panels hinged together that lift straight up and back along tracks on the ceiling. They are the most common new installation in Cape Town because they suit short driveways — the car can park right against the door — and double garages, and because insulated panels are available for a garage under a bedroom. They need headroom and ceiling depth, and they are the most expensive of the three.
Roll-up doors are aluminium slats that coil into a barrel above the opening. They need no ceiling tracks, which makes them the answer for low-headroom garages and for garages used as workshops where ceiling space matters. They handle wind well, which is why they are everywhere on the West Coast, and they are mid-priced. Their weakness is sand and grit in the guides, which is also a West Coast problem.
Tip-up doors are a single panel that swings out and up on pivot arms. They are the simplest mechanism, the cheapest to buy and the easiest to automate, and they are what most older Cape Town single garages have. They need clearance in front of the garage — a car parked close to a tip-up stops it opening — and they are the type most often made in timber, which looks right on an older house and needs maintenance to stay that way.
The motor is part of the door
A new door and a new motor are one job, not two. The motor is sized for the door that is being fitted — its weight, its type and how many times a day the household will open it — and it is fitted, wired and set up in the same visit as the door. Where an existing motor is sound and compatible, it can be kept, and that is quoted as an option rather than quietly dropped. Where it is not, garage door automation sets out how the sizing is done and why it matters; the short version is that a motor sized for the door lasts a decade and a motor chosen for price lasts three years.
Safety beams across the opening, the force limits set to reverse against a hand, two remotes programmed and a note of how to add more: all of that is part of the installation, not an extra.
Installation day, and what you are left with
The old door comes out first — a morning's work on a sectional, less on a tip-up — and the opening is checked and prepared: jambs made true, the lintel checked for the load, any rot or corrosion at the fixings dealt with before the new frame goes on. The new door is hung, the springs are wound and the door is balanced by hand before the motor goes anywhere near it. The motor is fitted, the beams set, the limits set, the door cycled, the remotes programmed. Most single doors are finished in a day; a double sectional with a new motor can run into a second morning.
You are left with a door that lifts with two fingers when the motor is disengaged, a motor that reverses against a hand's resistance, two remotes, and the old door taken away. The price agreed on measurement day is the price. If something in the opening turns out to need work that could not be seen before the old door came out — rot in a lintel, a jamb that has moved — it is shown to you and quoted before it is touched, not added to the invoice afterwards.