Garage Door Repair in Franklin, WI

Franklin voted to become a city on August 15, 1956, by 704 votes to 220, to avoid annexation by Milwaukee. Even so, the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee notes that about 80% of the city was still farmland in 1962. It had about 10,000 people in 1960 and about 12,200 in 1970, then grew to about 29,500 by 2000 and 36,816 by 2020.

That means most Franklin homes went up from the 1970s on, with a big share from the 1990s and 2000s. Typical houses have attached two- or three-car garages with steel sectional doors, torsion springs and builder-installed openers.

Those parts are now aging together. Springs reach the end of their rated cycles, openers slow down or quit after storms, and seals dry out. If you're thinking about a new door instead of another repair, see garage door installation.

Franklin's inspection department publishes a detailed handout on detached garages. A wood-frame garage is capped at 720 square feet on lots up to 40,000 square feet, and 900 square feet on larger lots. Masonry buildings on large lots can go bigger. Detached garages are limited to one story and 15 feet, must sit at least 10 feet from the house, and the roof must be built for a 30-pound-per-square-foot snow load.

One rule matters a lot for the door: the concrete floor must slope toward the garage door so water drains out. That's good for the floor, but it means meltwater runs straight to the bottom seal, where it can freeze the door to the slab on a cold night.

Replace a cracked bottom seal before winter, and free a frozen door by hand before using the opener. Building a new detached garage needs a permit, and any electrical work must be done by an electrical contractor under its own permit.

Lift cables run from the bottom of the door up to drums on the spring shaft. When a cable rusts, frays or slips off its drum, one side of the door drops and the door hangs crooked. On a cold, salty Wisconsin winter, the bottom end of the cable is usually where the damage starts.

If your door is crooked or a cable is hanging loose, stop using the door. Don't try to rewind the cable or loosen the bottom bracket, because both are under spring tension. Call for garage door cable repair, and if the door is stuck open on a winter night, see emergency garage door repair for what to do while you wait.

Parts of Franklin still have larger, semi-rural lots, and the city still regulates private wells. The Root River runs south through the city and splits it roughly in two.

On a large lot, the garage may be far from the road, with a long driveway that drifts with snow. A keypad at the door and a battery backup for the opener make sense when you can't easily get in another way during an outage.

Wondering whether to swap an opener yourself? Our post on replacing a garage door opener yourself covers what's safe for a homeowner and what isn't.

There's a Franklin in our Nashville market too, so make sure you're on the right page. This one covers Franklin in southern Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, between Oak Creek, Greendale, Hales Corners and Muskego. Calls from here go to technicians working the Milwaukee area we serve.

Spring breaks here tend to rise with the first hard cold. If you hear a bang and the door won't lift, see broken spring repair in Milwaukee and stop using the opener until a technician checks it.

Franklin's first business park grew out of former Cold War Nike missile sites in the 1970s. Today the city has business and industrial parks, and Northwestern Mutual is among its largest employers. Ballpark Commons, built on a former landfill, opened Franklin Field in 2019 and has added sports, retail and residential space since.

Warehouses, shops and service buildings use sectional overhead doors, rolling steel doors and dock doors that cycle far more than home doors. Worn springs, damaged sections and tired operators are the common repairs, and commercial door work is part of what we do in every market we serve.