Ten Garage-Related Facts to Make Your Day

We're big fans of education and enjoy posting informative articles that help people make informed decisions when it comes to garage door installations. Every once in a while, though, we like to take a break, step back and have a little fun. After all, there's more to the story than garage door openers, torsion springs, rollers, garage door insulation and remotes. So for this post, we decided to do something a little different and focus on some interesting and little-known tidbits and trivia related to garage doors and the garage in general. Enjoy.

Ten Fun Facts From Our Parker Overhead Door Company

The modern garage has its own special place in Western culture having descended from the carriage house to become our refuge from the elements, our workshop, our storage space of choice and even our man cave. Here are ten fun and interesting facts you may or may not know about the garage.

1. More than half of all homeowners use the garage door as the main entrance to their house. That's not to say that people don't have front doors. Just that they tend to enter and exit their property inside their cars. The further away from the city center you go the more this is true. Among other things this fact underscores the need to ensure you have proper garage door security features in place on the garage door and in the garage itself.
2. Less than half of all American homeowners list "parking" as the most important function of their garage. On a related note, more than one-quarter of US homeowners say their garage is so full of other stuff that there is no room for their car.
3. The average garage door opens and closes a little more than 4 times a day. That's about 1,500 times every year. Considering that a well-maintained door can last for up to 20 years (and sometimes longer) that's 30,000 times the door will open and close during its life.
4. Some of today's biggest tech companies started out in garages. Apple, for instance (current market cap of $2.6 trillion), got its start when founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak set up shop in Jobs' mother's garage in Cupertino, California. Google (current market cap of $1.5 trillion) also got its start in a garage when Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up an office in their friend Susan Wojcicki's garage. For the record, Wojcicki is now the head of Youtube, which is of course owned by Google. And let's not forget Microsoft (current market cap of $2.1 trillion) which got its start in the Gates family garage.
5. If you are looking for a home improvement project that will yield impressive ROI, call A Better Garage Door and ask to speak to garage door sales. Of all home improvement projects, a new garage door will yield the top return on investment at just over 97%. That's better than a new kitchen or a new bathroom.
6. A man named Andy Fields was hopping from garage sale to garage sale in Las Vegas when he came across what he considered to be a few interesting paintings. The owner let him have them for the less-than-princely sum of $5. After taking them home Fields examined the paintings carefully. He found that one of the works was painted over an unrelated sketch. Further examination revealed the sketch had been done by Andy Warhol and was later appraised at $2 million.
7. 100 years ago when automobiles were just beginning to catch on the average garage made up about 8% of the total square footage of a home. Since then cars have gotten bigger and we have become fond of having 2 or even 3 at our beck and call. As a result, the average garage on a home built in 2022 makes up nearly half the square footage of the entire house.
8. Multi-trillion dollar high-tech corporations are not the only things that used the garage as a launch pad. Some of the most successful rock bands in history got their start by practicing, and sometimes playing out of, the family garage. Those bands include The Beatles, Metallica, The Kinks and the original monsters of rock Van Halen who frequently played backyard gigs in the early-mid 1970s where they would set up in the garage.
9. The garage is a descendant of the carriage house which was a large, barn-like structure well-separated from the house where the well-to-do stored their horse-drawn carriages. When horseless carriages ("car" being short for "carriage") came along there was no longer any need for the horses, or the huge carriage house, and the garage gradually migrated closer to the house before being entirely integrated after World War II.
10. During hurricanes, the garage door is one of the most common starting points for a home's destruction. The intense winds look for weak points in a structure and they find them in the garage door. It's not the door's fault, however. If you live in a hurricane-prone area you can mitigate this problem by installing a hurricane-ready garage door that will greatly improve your home's chances of emerging unscathed.

Call Our Garage Door Service Team

Need an overhead door installation or repair? Get in touch with A Better Garage Door. If you live in Parker or Broomfield you can find us by searching for "garage door installers near me." Or you can just give us a call at (303) 920-2267.