doorsgaragegarage-door
I have a tuck under single car garage in my bungalow that currently has carriage doors that have seen better days.
I would like to replace the carriage doors with an automatic (and insulated) door, however, everything I've seen seems to require a minimum of 7" of clearance between the top of the door opening and the ceiling of the garage. My garage only has 5" of clearance.
Does anyone have experience with garage door solutions that will work for this small amount of available clearance?
These look nice
You could probably build a simpler version pretty cheap.
Also if the doors are large enough, and you are ambitious enough you could put a smaller "man" door in one of the doors. That way when you go in and out you don't have to open the large doors, but you still have the large doors for getting large projects/lawn tractor in and out.
If the existing setup works, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work with new doors instead. One down side to this setup though, is that doors without jambs aren't that secure and could probably be kicked in fairly easily. If it were my garage, and I didn't want a standard fold up door or a roll-up, I'd probably put in 2 larger barn style doors, or if you have the space, one of those sliding barn style doors that has an overhead track to slide on.
Best Answer
One of the custom door manufacturers should be able to make you something. Yes, it's not a typical application being that small, but there's no major issues in the design. Doors are assembled from panels, so they can select the right size and quantity. Track frequently has to be cut down to fit anyways. Custom springs are no big deal (a surprising percentage of what's out there is custom).
However, you're not going to be able to walk into a local big box hardware place and pickup off the shelf components to DIY.