Garage Doors on San Antonio's Older Housing Stock

The Situation

Most of the houses we get called to across San Antonio went up somewhere between 1954 and 2010, with the median build year landing around 1992. That's a long stretch, and it means we see three different generations of garage door on any given street - uninsulated steel slabs from the 70s and 80s, the first wave of polystyrene-core doors from the 90s, and newer polyurethane doors on houses built after 2000. Neighborhoods like Woodlawn Hills, Crownhill Park, and Shearer Hills / Ridgeview still have a lot of the older single-layer doors on original hardware, while areas that filled in later, like Timberwood Park or Cibolo, skew toward doors with foam already built in.

When a door was built before insulation rules tightened, the panel itself is just a sheet of steel with no thermal break. That doesn't matter much in a mild climate.

It matters here, where we're in a severe heat band for a good chunk of the year. A garage with an uninsulated door and a car parked over the family room turns into an oven, and the door itself takes the brunt of the expansion and contraction that comes with it.

We're not going to tell you every door from that era needs replacing tomorrow. Plenty of them are still sound mechanically. The issue is usually the panel skin and the weatherstrip, not the frame.