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Proudly Serving Dallas & Surrounding Counties
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Support Local! We're Committed to Providing Exceptional Service
Proudly Serving Dallas & Surrounding Counties
Support Local! We're Committed to Providing Exceptional Service
Much of Richardson was built in two very different generations: the houses that went up between the 1950s and the 1970s, and the apartment communities that arrived in the 2010s. We repair springs, openers, cables and doors on both, and we install new doors and openers when a repair won’t hold. You’ll hear what’s wrong and what it costs before any work starts.
Suburban Garage Door is a family-owned, women-owned business, and we’ve been fixing garage doors since 1992. Susan Bywater runs the company, and the people who answer your call and come to your house have names you’ll get to know.
A door that won’t move is stressful, especially with a car on the wrong side of it. A few careful minutes now keep a small repair from turning into a large one.
One more check matters on a lot of older Richardson houses: is there a small sensor on each side of the opening, a few inches off the floor? If not, the opener can’t see anyone in the door’s path, so keep everyone well back while it runs, or leave it off until we’ve looked at it.
For urgent problems on a weekday evening, our emergency garage door service covers urgent calls made between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays with same-day service. It carries an after-hours call-out fee, and we’ll tell you that up front.
Richardson’s housing came in two big waves, with steadier building in between. Roughly 44 percent of the city’s housing predates 1980, and nearly all of it went up in a single thirty-year run from 1950 to 1979. Then about one unit in five was built in the 2010s, and that wave was overwhelmingly apartments rather than houses.
For a garage door, those two groups have almost nothing in common. A house from the 1960s has usually been through at least one or two rounds of new doors, springs and openers, installed by different people over the decades, often with no paperwork left behind. So on an older house we treat every part as unknown until we’ve checked it: whether the springs suit the door that’s hanging there now, whether the track was reset when the door changed, and whether the opener is older than the door it lifts.
The newer communities are a different job. Where they have rows of garages, the doors tend to have gone in together with matching hardware, so they wear on a similar schedule. When a property manager calls us about one tired spring in a row of garages, we’ll say what we noticed about the others, and the decision stays with them.
Since January 1, 1993, federal law has required residential garage door openers to include external entrapment protection. In practice that means the pair of photo-eye sensors near the floor: if anything breaks the beam between them, the door reverses. An opener manufactured before that date was never built with them.
In a city where so much of the housing predates 1980, it’s worth knowing which kind you have. Most of those original openers are long gone, but an old unit that still runs is easy to keep using without a second thought. Sensors that have been unplugged, or bundled together up by the ceiling to stop a door from reversing, leave you in the same place.
If your opener was built without sensors, we’ll tell you plainly that it should be replaced, and if the sensors are only disconnected, we’ll put them back in service. When the sensors are there and the door simply refuses to close, the cause is often small: a bracket nudged by a bike or a broom, a dusty lens, or low sun shining straight into one eye. One customer got that tip over the phone:
“she recommended that I give some attention to the electric eyes. … it works in both directions, up and down, now.”
Jeff W., on Google
On October 20, 2019, a tornado rated EF3 for damage in Dallas tracked into Richardson and weakened as it went. Inside the city, the National Weather Service survey found damage in the EF0 to EF1 range: widespread tree and roof damage through subdivisions such as Lakes of Buckingham and College Park, and a few homes that lost their roofs entirely. It narrowed and dissipated on the east side of the city near Duck Creek.
Less than five years later, on May 28, 2024, straight-line winds did their own damage with no tornado involved. National Weather Service survey teams estimated winds of 83 mph along one damage path and 78 mph along another that same day.
A closed garage door is one of the largest flat surfaces on a house, and wind pushes on all of it at once. That load lands on the hinges, rollers, struts and track. A door can take the hit, keep opening and closing, and still have a bent section or a roller halfway out of its track.
Nothing looks wrong from the driveway, but every trip now asks more of the springs and the opener than they were set up to give. If your door has sounded or moved differently since a storm, that’s a good reason to have it looked at.
Hail is the other storm hazard for steel panels: on September 24, 2023, observers in the city reported stones two inches across and larger, enough to crease a thin panel.
Richardson’s older neighborhoods are being remodeled, and the city’s own rules reflect that. Three of them touch the garage.
Richardson’s zoning code includes language written for one specific case: a detached garage built to replace a garage that was enclosed or converted into living space. The city wrote that situation into its code, which says a lot about the age of the houses here.
What the new structure has to meet is between you, your builder and the city’s building officials, and we leave that conversation to them. Our part starts once the walls and header are up. We size the door to the finished opening, match the springs to the door’s weight, and install the opener with its safety sensors. Tell us the opening size and ceiling height early, because headroom and side room decide which doors and openers will fit.
Residents can ask the city for an optional Neighborhood Development Overlay, meant to keep new building and remodeling compatible with an established neighborhood. Putting one together takes a neighborhood committee, owner signatures, measurements of setbacks, lot coverage and building height, and an inventory of garage conditions. The city even lends out the measuring equipment.
If your street is working on one, garages are part of how the neighborhood describes itself. We look at garage doors all day, and during any visit we can tell you what’s on yours: how the door is built, what kind of springs it runs on, and roughly how old the opener is.
Richardson also runs a Home Improvement Incentive Program for homeowners in single-family zoned areas. As the city describes it, a reconstruction or remodeling project costing at least $20,000 and finished within 24 months of approval can earn a one-time incentive equal to ten times the increase in city taxes that comes from the higher appraised value. Homeowners behind on city taxes or fees aren’t eligible.
Whether a project qualifies is the city’s decision, not ours, and the current terms live with the city’s Community Services department. If a new garage door and opener are part of a bigger remodel, we’ll price that portion clearly so it fits into your plans.
Richardson is close to an even split between owners and renters, and roughly 42 percent of its housing units sit in buildings with two or more units. Nearly a fifth are in buildings of 50 units or more. A good share of the garage doors in this city belong to someone other than the person who parks behind them.
We work on residential garage doors wherever they hang: on a detached house, a townhome, or a row of garages behind an apartment building. Property managers can set up an account with us and call one number for every building they look after. The line we draw is the kind of door, not the kind of customer, so commercial roll-up doors and very tall doors go to a commercial door company.
If you rent, the door usually belongs to the owner, so start with your property manager or landlord. We’re happy to talk with whichever of you calls.
Most calls come down to a handful of parts: a frayed lift cable, worn rollers, a cracked hinge, a bent track, a section that’s pulled loose, or a bottom seal that’s gone stiff and let in water and leaves. Our garage door repair service covers all of it, on every brand of door.
Much of Richardson sits on shallow soil formed over chalk, with deeper black clay in other parts of the city. On deep clay, a slab can shift with the seasons enough to pull an opening slightly out of square. Shallow ground over chalk is less often the explanation. So when a bottom seal shows a gap at one end, we check whether the door is out of balance or the opening itself has moved before adjusting anything, because the fix differs: a cable or spring adjustment for a door that’s out of balance, or resetting the track and seal to fit an opening that has moved.
We’ll also tell you when a repair is the better answer than a new door. One customer put it this way:
“They were prompt in coming out and performing the fixes that included repairing the door versus replacement.”
Phil P., on Google
The springs do the heavy lifting on a garage door. Most doors today run on torsion springs, the tightly wound coils on the bar above the opening, and plenty of older garages still use extension springs, the long springs that stretch alongside the horizontal tracks. Either way, springs are rated in cycles, not years, and one cycle is one trip up and back down.
A standard spring is commonly rated for about 10,000 cycles. Divide that by how many times your door runs each day and you have a rough life span: a door that runs four times a day uses up that rating in about seven years. A busy household with teenagers driving gets there sooner.
On a Richardson house from the 1960s or 1970s, the springs on the door are rarely the first set, and they may have been sized for a lighter door than the one hanging there now. When we handle broken spring repair, we set the springs to the weight of your door as it is today, not to whatever was installed last time. If you have extension springs, we’ll make sure a safety cable runs through each one, so a spring that snaps stays contained.
An opener that groans, stops halfway or reverses for no reason most often needs a part, not a replacement. Worn gears, a slack chain or belt, a door that stops short of the floor, and remotes that have lost their codes are everyday fixes in our garage door opener repair work, on all major brands. When the motor or circuit board itself is worn out, or the unit has no safety sensors at all, we’ll show you why the money belongs in a new opener instead.
When it’s time to replace one, our garage door opener installation service mostly fits LiftMaster openers. Newer models run quieter, many connect to your phone, and every one includes the safety sensors older Richardson garages may be missing. We program your remotes and keypads before we leave.
“Ben arrived right on time and performed maintenance on my very old opener. He also gave me great advice on how to care for the unit.”
Beverly S., on Google
A new door earns its price when the old one keeps costing you: a bottom section rusting from the floor up, a thin single-layer door that dents whenever a basketball finds it, or a door that’s been patched after every storm. If we think yours has reached that point, we’ll explain why, and our garage door installation team handles the new door from measurement to the final balance check.
Older garages aren’t always built to today’s standard sizes, especially after a conversion, a reopening or decades of small changes. We measure the opening, the headroom and the side room before recommending anything. If your street has an HOA or deed restrictions, check their rules on style and color before you choose, and we’ll help you narrow the options to doors that suit the house. You can browse styles on our new garage doors page.
A classic style with a distinctive design.
An original style with endless options.
A traditional look with a modern construction.
On an older house, a maintenance visit is often the first time anyone has looked at the whole system together. We lubricate moving parts with food-grade lubricant, tighten hardware, check the balance and spring tension, adjust the travel limits and force settings, and test the safety reversal and sensors.
For a newer community, regular garage door maintenance spreads the wear out and catches a tired roller or cable before it becomes a stuck door and an unhappy resident. Current offers, including maintenance specials, are on our coupons page.
Nicola or Nicole will answer, ask what the door is doing, and book a two-hour arrival window, so you aren’t giving up a whole day. Ben and Neil are our senior technicians, and Chet works alongside them on installations.
Whoever comes out walks you through what’s wrong and what caused it, and tells you what the work will cost before any of it starts. If a repair will hold, that’s what we recommend. No hidden fees and no upselling: that’s how we’ve kept customers since 1992.
Our office hours are Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. We’re closed Sunday.
Our house was built in the 1960s. Does the opener have safety sensors?
Only if it was made on or after January 1, 1993, or someone added them. Look for two small sensors a few inches off the floor on either side of the opening. If they’re missing or disconnected, keep everyone clear of the door and give us a call, because that opener can’t see a person or pet in the doorway.
Our door still works after the 2024 windstorm. Should we have it checked?
If it sounds louder, runs unevenly or sits crooked when closed, yes. Wind can bend a section or pull a roller partly out of the track without stopping the door, and the opener then strains on every cycle. Caught early, that’s a hardware repair. Left alone, it can end with a spring or an opener.
We manage apartments in Richardson with rows of garages. Do you work on those?
Yes, as long as they’re residential-style sectional doors. We work with property managers on accounts and can handle anything from one broken spring to maintenance across a property. Commercial roll-up doors and very tall doors aren’t our work.
We’re replacing a converted garage with a detached one. When do we call you?
Call us while the plans are still being drawn, so the opening, header height and side room suit the door and opener you want. Your builder works out what the city needs for the garage itself; we come back to hang the door, set the springs and mount the opener once it’s framed.
Does a new garage door count toward Richardson’s Home Improvement Incentive Program?
The city decides what qualifies, and the program is aimed at reconstruction and remodeling projects of at least $20,000. A garage door can be part of a larger project, and we can price that portion clearly for your plans. Check the current terms with the city’s Community Services department before you count on the incentive.
Every city we cover is listed on our service areas page.
Tell us what the door is doing and roughly when the house was built, and we’ll tell you honestly what it needs.
Call: (972) 414-6900
