We just had no idea: Garage edition.

When you buy a house, your first house, you really have no idea what you're getting into. There will be little surprises that pop up along the way, no matter what.

Today's surprise, the garage. Specifically, the garage door openers.

As mentioned previously, our home has two garage doors. They work separately - each with its own garage door opener.

When we moved in, the door on the left was working. The door on the right was not. Both could be opened manually. Both were Sears Craftsman doors (I later found the original boxes, circa 1998, in the garage) and the previous owner left us with no push-button openers. They did give us the number code to the box right outside the garage door. So that's how we opened it - pull into the driveway, put the car in park, leap out and punch in the code, get back in the car. It wasn't ideal, but we had bigger fish to fry and opted to live with it.

I should stop to mention the weirder item now: There is an attic space above the garage. The garage door opener blocked access to it. You couldn't get the door down without it hitting the end of the opener. This struck me as scary, mainly because I had no idea what kind of wreckage had been left up there for us to deal with.

Photo from inspection. The Craftsman opener, blocking entry to the attic.

I was researching the garage doors already for the future possibility of fixing the door on the right and for adjusting the door on the left to not block the attic. It seemed expensive though - about $300-400 just to fix one of them using a garage door company.

And then... both doors broke. It became leap out of the car, yank the door up, get back in the car. I was OVER IT in a matter of days. And basically on a whim, like I purchase most things, I decided to go ahead and get a new opener from Lowe's and have their people install it.

I chose this one (Genie 3/4-HP Intellicode 2 Belt Garage Door Opener) because it was both quiet and not the most expensive.

From left to right: openers for the car, opener for beside the house door, sensors to make sure nobody gets crushed, opener for outside the garage door.)

The installation guy shows up and I tell him we're looking to fix the door on the left. He immediately takes one look at the attic situation and declares it impossible.

Hey, guess what you should know about garage door openers? Most need to be at least 10 feet back from the opening of the garage. Which would put our opener right over the attic door. Basically, to EVER fix this issue, we'll have to hire a contractor to completely relocate the attic door. Sounds super cheap and easy.

What gets me most about this: Why wasn't this built right to begin with? I know they had garage door openers when this house was built. Nobody saw this as an issue? The attic door clearly can't open! Rage face.

Anyway, I digress. I asked the installer to fix the right garage door instead. (He seemed amazed that we had two broken doors, which I found funny. I've never had a garage in all these apartments. Any garage - even a broken one - was a step up!) My husband and I rushed to clear that right area which had become a dumping ground for paint, bird seed, trash cans, etc. Then the installer took about an hour and a half to get the door up. And it's pretty awesome. So quiet! Like a remote control car. You can also turn the light on and off manually. And lock the door completely.

A couple of weeks later, I finally got around to programming the push button opener outside the garage. And I learned how to lock the broken door on the left manually, because really anybody could just pull it open. (To lock: there are metal bars on the inside of the garage door that basically expand and slide into grooves on the walls beside the garage. The metal grooves stop the door from going up. That description makes little sense, sorry.)

I've been pretty happy with the one working door for awhile now. Though I did run into an issue - our bathroom started leaking (individual post(s) to come) and I needed to get into that space because it was near the damage. I told Shoe I wanted to take down that garage door opener so we could open the attic door. But he delayed me - said we should wait for my dad to visit or wait for the upcoming weekend.

Impatience and rage do a lot for me. So while Shoe was at a late work function, I dragged out the ladder, some screwdrivers, wrenches and such, and got to work. At first, I thought I could just take the opener off the ceiling - wrong. The opener connects to a long bar that goes all the way to the other wall of the garage. I wouldn't be able to hold all that weight on a ladder by myself. So I decided to just dismantle the opener, piece by piece, until I got enough clearance.

By the end, I was hot, sweaty, angry, etc. But this was the eventual result:

Let that be a warning to all electronics that mess with me.

Voila! I was in the attic space where there was all good news - no mess left behind, a relatively big space that we can add a plywood flooring to for storage, and no leaks. Also, no scary, rabid raccoon running at my face which was my true fear when I poked my head up there.

The garage door opener hung in that state for a few weeks. Then my dad visited and we took down the whole thing. Goodbye broken opener! Good riddance.