Easy DIY Winterizing Part II – Garage Door

If you’re like us, you have a great little house that has its fair share of drafty corners and cracks.  Maybe you even have cheaper windows than you’d prefer, possibly a vaulted ceiling that sucks warm air up and far away from where you want it, and maybe you also store your paint in the basement like we do because your garage gets cold enough in winter to freeze anything stored in it.

Well, as relatively new homeowners (of a year and a couple months), we’re still learning how to seal up the house and deal with all those little energy suckers.  After Part I, we’re now onto Part II of my Winterizing Series.

Temperature-wise, our garage barely qualifies as a garage.  When it’s hot out, it’s even hotter in the garage.  When it’s cold out, it’s only a few degrees warmer in the garage.  Paint freezes out there, and so do all other liquids.  It also makes the two bedrooms over it very hot or very cold, depending on the day.

Part of the reason our garage is so energy inefficient is that most of its walls are uninsulated.

The other big reason is we have an aluminum garage door which is also uninsulated.

Insulating the walls seems a little harder than insulating the garage door, so I decided to tackle the garage door first. 

I googled all around, looking for ideas for insulating a garage door, and I found quite a few.  Most of the suggestions and products for this task, though, involve an expense of $100 or more to buy the materials.  I was completely prepared to spend that money, and it was even built into our September budget….until I found another option.

Duck has a brand new product called the “Reflective Insulation Kit” and right now you can only buy it at Wal-Mart, which is where I stumbled across it.  It’s not only inexpensive at $30 a box (one box is enough for one single-car garage door), but it includes the insulation materials, the double-sided tape used to affix it, and directions.  Plus, you get the right amount of material, and the other options I had been finding required purchasing a large roll of material, which could very possibly result in a ton of extra or not enough, depending on my measuring abilities! 

You can use the kit to insulate radiators, water heaters, garage doors, and probably lots of other things too.

So we brought home two kits, and hubby volunteered to install it.  Some measuring, cutting, and taping later, and our garage door is now insulated.  The weather has been unseasonably warm lately, though not in the 90s anymore, so the jury is still out as to whether it makes a noticeable difference.  I’m optimistic 🙂

Thanks for stopping by!  The next and probably last winterizing post will be sometime next week…all about door shoes! (Boy oh BOY!)