Richmond's overhead doors sit on the half of the city that has driveways: the west-side grid through Thompson, Broadmoor and Seafair, the Hamilton streets off Westminster Highway, Steveston, and the subdivisions running south to Ironwood. Off its track, a cable parted, rollers seized, a section knocked in, a bottom seal that no longer meets the slab. We fix it on the driveway it is standing on, and nothing is signed off until the lock bar reaches its keeper with the door shut.
A good half of Richmond has no garage door to repair. Down the Aberdeen and Lansdowne corridor to Brighouse, and across the Capstan and Alexandra blocks of West Cambie, the parking is underneath the building. Private overhead doors start where the towers stop: Thompson, Broadmoor, Seafair, Terra Nova, Steveston, Hamilton, Ironwood and Gilmore.
Two answers sort a Richmond garage call before anything is loaded. The first is what sort of building you are standing in front of, because a ramp dropping into a strata parkade is the building's own equipment while a driveway with a door at the end of it is yours. The second is whether that door is a single or a two-car double, which on the west-side streets it usually is. That one decides the spring, whether the cables come off as a pair, and how much of the visit is the balance test at the end.
Worth clearing up first, because it saves a wasted call in the densest part of the city. The residential buildings along No. 3 Road, and the newer ones on Hollybridge Way and around Capstan Way, park underground. That ramp gate is strata property rather than any one resident's, and so is the fob that lifts it. Both are arranged through the property manager. Our work begins at your own door, whether that is a suite door on the twentieth floor or an overhead door on a driveway in Seafair.
A torsion spring is wound to the weight of one particular door and holds that energy the whole time the door is down. There is no safe way to let it off without winding bars and clamps, which is why it is the one item on this page nobody will talk you through over the phone. The tell is weight rather than noise. Pull the opener release, lift by hand, and a door that used to come up with two fingers and now fights you has lost a spring. If it went with a single bang and nothing has worked since, leave it where it is. On the two-car garages that are standard through Thompson there is more weight hanging over the opening than most owners assume, and a door with a broken spring that keeps being run on the opener takes the track and the opener with it.
| Repair | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Track realignment / off-track reset | $120–$260 |
| Roller replacement (full set) | $90–$220 |
| Lift cable replacement (pair) | $110–$240 |
| Torsion spring replacement (single) | $180–$340 |
| Torsion spring replacement (pair) | $260–$480 |
| Panel / section repair or replacement | $180–$500+ |
| Weather seal & bottom-seal replacement | $80–$180 |
| Tune-up, balance & lubrication service | $90–$160 |
Every band is inclusive: the part, the fitting and the setting up afterwards. Where a Richmond door lands inside its band is mostly a question of width and weight. The single-car doors under the Ironwood and Steveston townhome stratas sit at the light end. The wide insulated doubles out on the Thompson lots sit at the heavy one, where the spring is larger, the sections are longer and a matching panel has to be sourced rather than pulled off the truck. Tell us the door and the symptom when you ring, and the band comes down to a figure before anyone is dispatched.
Single or double, the rough vintage of the house, and the symptom in plain terms: hanging crooked, rising a foot and stopping, suddenly heavy by hand, water tracking underneath. In a townhome complex in Ironwood or Steveston, give the unit number as well as the street.
Garage work happens on the driveway, so the approach counts for more than it does on a suite call. Broadmoor and Terra Nova come off Williams Road or No. 4 Road, Thompson from Blundell Road or up No. 1 Road, Seafair off No. 1 Road, Granville Avenue or River Road, Ironwood down No. 5 Road from Steveston Highway, Gilmore west along Steveston Highway or south on No. 4 Road. Say which of those the driveway sits on and the arrival window is set against that route rather than a city-wide average.
Nothing gets priced before the cause is established. A repaired door is not then signed off on the strength of it opening. It is cycled with the opener disengaged so the balance can be felt at the halfway point, run through again under power, then shut and locked with someone watching the bottom edge meet the slab. If the lock bar will not reach its keeper the job is not done, whatever the door is doing overhead.
Thompson is the clearest case in the city. It is the grid running from No. 2 Road out to No. 1 Road, bracketed by Blundell Road at the top and Williams Road at the bottom, almost entirely detached single-family, generous lots, two-car garages, and very little strata in it at all. That last part matters more than it sounds: the person ringing owns the door and can simply say go ahead, without a council or a property manager in the middle of it. Broadmoor next door was built across four decades, 1960s to 1990s, and has been filling in and renovating ever since, and Seafair out west is late 1960s through the 1980s on full-size lots, attached garages with a side or rear entry beside them.
What comes with the call on all three of those streets is the second door. There is nearly always a keyed pedestrian door in the garage wall, and a door from the garage through into the house. Those swing on hinges and run on an ordinary strike, so they are a different job from the panel overhead: the frame and hardware side is covered on our door repair page, and what to put on them on our garage door locks page. Both get looked at while the truck is on the driveway.
Hamilton sits at the east end of Richmond along Westminster Highway, out near the New Westminster and Queensborough boundary, and it is the one part of the city a truck reaches by a different road than everything else, either along Westminster Highway from the west or over the Queensborough Bridge connector from outside Richmond. The housing is newer than most of the city, mainly 1990s and 2000s, and the townhomes north of Westminster Highway are wood frame.
The larger-lot houses toward Francis Road and the river dyke are the ones that change a garage call. On those the garage is the front of the house: a full-garage front entry, with the pedestrian doors put round the side or the back. So when an overhead door there will not close flush or will not lock down, the whole front elevation of the house is standing open, which is a different order of problem from a detached garage at the back of a lot.
West along Steveston Highway toward No. 4 Road the residential grid runs out into Agricultural Land Reserve farmland, larger lots and small hobby farms, and two things change with it. The garage is more often detached and standing away from the house than built into it. And the property normally carries something else alongside it, a workshop, a shed, an equipment store, so what gets described on the phone as a garage door can turn out to be three separate closures of three different ages. The houses out here span the post-war agricultural era through the 1970s and 1980s subdivisions, and the hardware on them has generally been updated in pieces rather than all at once. Naming each opening when you book is what keeps it to a single visit.
The single-car garage under a townhome behaves differently from one on a driveway, and Richmond has two clusters of them. Steveston has row-house stratas around Steveston Highway and townhome complexes a few blocks north of the village core off No. 1 Road and Railway Avenue. Ironwood, at the far south end around the No. 5 Road and Steveston Highway corner, is mostly 1990s and 2000s subdivision with 2010s infill and a good deal of strata townhome through it.
One timing note for Steveston. Come summer the village fills up, Bayview Street and the boardwalk especially, so an afternoon slot down there is worth avoiding if a morning one works for you. The approach is Steveston Highway rather than threading through the village core. The rest of the year it is an ordinary run.
Most owners find out their garage door lock has stopped working long after it actually did, because nobody uses it while the opener is running. On a sectional door the slide lock is a bolt that shoots through a slot cut in the vertical track, and it wants the door sitting exactly where it sat when that slot was cut. Let the door drop a few millimetres, from a stretched cable, a worn roller or a bottom section that has taken a knock, and the bolt arrives at track instead of slot. A lock bar and a T-handle fail for the same reason. That is the last thing checked on every repair we do, and if the lock turns out to be worn past adjusting or was never fitted in the first place, what to put on instead is on the garage door locks page. The opener itself, its motor, its remotes and its safety sensors, is a separate visit and lives on the opener repair page.
The overhead door is one job on the truck. Locks, keys, safes and door hardware are the rest of it, anywhere inside Richmond, on the same licensed tech.