Garage door repair in Miramar, from Historic Miramar to Sunset Lakes

Built in the 1950s, built in the 2000s

Miramar was incorporated in 1955 as a small town between SW 64th Avenue and University Drive, south of Pembroke Road, and Census estimates still date nearly one home in five in the city to the 1950s and 1960s. In those original blocks, a garage door may be older than the impact rules Broward enforces now, or it was swapped long ago and the paperwork is gone. Then the honest answer is often a new door, not another patch. The western half of the city is a different story: about a third of Miramar's homes went up in the 2000s, in communities like Monarch Lakes, Silver Shores and Sunset Lakes, so an original door there has 17 to 26 years on it. Out there, what fails first tends to be a part that has done its miles, a torsion spring for instance, rather than the door.

Irma's tornado on 172nd Avenue

During Irma in 2017, the National Weather Service confirmed an EF-1 tornado along 172nd Avenue, between Memorial Hospital and Miramar Regional Park, that tore stands of trees apart. Miramar, like all of Broward, is High-Velocity Hurricane Zone (HVHZ) territory, and the county's wind chart for overhead doors shows where the strain goes: on a 16 by 7 door, the outward pull of 45.0 pounds per square foot beats the inward push of 37.0. Those are worst-case figures from a voluntary chart; the pressure for your opening comes from the plan or an engineer. Either way, the horizontal struts across the sections and the anchors holding the track to the wall do much of the work. If an old repair left a strut off or swapped the anchors for smaller ones, we show you before anything else. Impact-rated garage doors.

What Miramar's door permit asks for

A replacement door here is permitted by the City of Miramar, not by Pembroke Pines. The Building Division's windows and doors package wants the product approval (a state approval number, or a Notice of Acceptance from Miami-Dade) with the options that fit the opening circled, a sketch locating each opening, and the Broward wind load chart, which has a table just for overhead garage doors. When you hire a contractor, the contractor has to pull the permit; an owner who does the work as owner-builder must show photo ID, proof of ownership and a homestead exemption. The city also states that the new state exemption for small jobs (HB 803) does not reach windows and doors, because Miramar counts them as structural work. Door permits in Pembroke Pines, for comparison.

ZIP codes

• 33023
• 33025
• 33027
• 33029