“It’s quite a bit of money and we aren’t quite sure which way to go…”

Photo by PoPville flickr user Brian Mosley

“Dear PoPville,

I live in one of those DC rowhouses that has a long backyard that opens to an alley. We park our car in the backyard and drive pretty frequently. We have padlocked fence doors we have to unlock the padlock, prop open the door, close door, and re-lock, every time we want to use the car. So we are considering installing an open-air electric garage door to replace our fence doors.

We’ve come across three main types of garage doors and here is what I know so far:

Overhead door: traditional garage door, requires a new structure like this to be built (total cost $4-5k)
Commercial grade roll-up door: super heavy duty, has it’s own structure built in (so no additional structure needed), rolls up on itself like a tube of wrapping paper (total cost $8-10k).
Roll-up sheet door: rolls up,but hangs on existing fence’s wooden posts (instead of its own structure like the commercial grade kind), less heavy duty compared to commercial grade (total cost $5-6k)

The third option roll-up sheet door seems like a middle ground option between the overhead and commercial grade. However, for some reason, we haven’t seen any of these doors in our neighborhood and we are wondering  why… any idea?

It’s quite a bit of money and we aren’t quite sure which way to go… Would appreciate any insight and pros/cons about the three garage doors mentioned (overhead, commercial grade roll-up, and roll-up sheet) especially regarding durability, aesthetic, maintenance, security, impact on house resale value etc.

These open air garage doors seem to be very DC-specific, so thanks in advance for the advice!”