The massive amounts of rain we’ve received in Oklahoma over the past month has had an affect on us. After the water level in the pond behind our house rose significantly, We’ve seen several displaced snakes up near the house, for example. The mosquitos are bad this year from all the standing water and will continue to be bad throughout the summer, I’m sure.

Also, recently, I’ve noticed water seeping in to the garage when it rains. The concrete is only wet about a foot into the garage and not enough to damage anything, but long term this seems like a problem. A visual inspection of the garage door revealed that the seal that runs along the bottom of the door appears to be worn out. Susan assured me that this would be a quick home repair, and so we decided to tackle it Sunday afternoon.

The project began by removing the old piece of rubber from the bottom of the garage door. It was permanently affixed to a strip of metal that was screwed to the bottom of the door. Mason took all the screws out and the trim piece came off. Progress!

Then Susan went to Home Depot and came back with two different rolls of seal, neither of which looked like anything we had removed. One needed to be glued to a garage door with a flat bottom (ours is not), and the other needed to be slid into a metal track. Setback!

Another trip to Home Depot later and we now owned 20′ of metal track. We only needed 16′ so I used the Dremmel to cut down the last piece of track. 20 screws later and the metal track was now attached to the bottom of the garage door. Boy this is going great!

Now it was time to slide in the rubber gasket. We got really good at this after the third or fourth time. Once it was finally in place we cut off the excess. Almost done!

Then we went to shut the garage door. For some reason completely unrelated to anything we had done, the right side of the garage door was 6″ higher than the other side. Perhaps a little shove would solve this? Nope, that made a wheel fall off. Maybe we could disengage the garage door and then realign get the garage door? Nope, that didn’t help. And now two more wheels have fallen out and it looks like the door is about to fall completely off the tracks and kill us. Also the left “guide wire” “?” was completely unwound at this point and wrapped around one of the door panels. And now the door won’t go up or down.

Well this took a turn, didn’t it. Did you know more garage door repairmen won’t come out on a Sunday night, even if there’s rain in the forecast?

One last trip to Home Depot netted us a 12’x20′ tarp and a box of staples for the staple gun. With the garage door temporarily sealed and the cars pulled up tight to prevent any would-be thieves from breaking in and stealing a bunch of old Atari games and broken computer parts, we went to sleep.

The garage door repairman showed up at 7:30am Monday morning and by 8am had everything back on track. The man assured Susan that “you didn’t do this,” although one would have to think that the timing is at best suspicious. Four aluminum strips, one roll of rubber strip, one giant tarp and one $85 house call and the door is as good as new. (Actually it’s not, but at least it doesn’t leak anymore.)