Garage Door Detail

Hello, I just wanted to show a couple detail pics of the garage doors (www.clopay.com) that I did this fall. I had really wanted to match the arch of the garage door glass with an arched roof structure, but I didn’t know how I was going to do that. You have to be inventive and creative when building arches…so… The big question was; What was I going to building the fascia out of? You couldn’t use metal fascia or flashing because then you would have cuts all over the place, it would look like fish scale. I didn’t want to use wood because of the high maintenance of the wood fascia. Also, I didn’t predict the difficulty of obtaining thin stock material to build the fascia out of. I had already built the roof and shingled it, unfortunately, I did that and didn’t have any definite plans on what to use for the fascia. I began checking into PVC or vinyl sofett material. The vinyl was out because it was all preformed. I had heard that I could bend it by warming it, but I couldn’t see how you could do that with preformed material with a 90 degree bend for the underside of the sofett. Plus, I know I would just make cheeseburger out of it by the time I would try and warm it anyway. I looked into Azek board (www.azek.com). I don’t know if you have ever built anything with this material, but it is pretty cool. You can router this material and deal with it just like regular wood. You have to predrill it in temps less than 40 degrees and utilize pvc glue, but other than that, it is just like wood. But where this material differs is that it is available in 3/4 inch sizes of nominal boards, but it is absolutely incredibly expensive and special order for boards wider than 8”. Like, expensive to the point that I would be spending over $400 on four boards to make my arches and spend over $1500 just to put fascia up on 28’ of roofing. That’s crazy. But like I said, I had already put my roof on and of course my drip edge, so to use 3/4 in thick material, I would have to tear off the shingles and drip edge and totally redo the roof! That wasn’t going to happen. In my attempts to find material that was maintenance free and affordable, I was able to find a material that was PVC based and came in large sheets. Actually, it was 4×8 sheets of PVC sheeting that is utilized for commercial wall covering. The material is the same type that you can get at home depot to put in bathrooms. I know Burger King sometimes uses this material on their bathroom walls. It is that blister type material, usually white, unless it was painted. Anyway, for $25 a sheet, I was able to match the arches perfectly, router the material and get it put up by myself without any problems. I have to be honest, my wife actually found it on the bottom shelf at home depot. Now when we go to get other materials, she tries to suggest things for me to buy (as if she knows what she is talking about)...I just tell her to sit down before she hurts herself. As far as the rest, I custom built all the trim and the fluted material. I also painted the doors, just to give a little finish dimension.

-- Todd