apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

After a quick google search, I came up with this http://www.glassgaragedoors.com/compare.htm . I dont' know how easy it would be to get one of these in Maine. Good luck :)

I used to live in Wisconsin and recall some restaurants had installed clear, glass-like garage doors to open up the space in summer and close it off during the cold months. These doors withstood the winter wrath. I think they were made by a company called Alaska Door or Alaska Garage Door. They are very cool and will provide a lot of natural light.

Oh it sounds gorgeous. With a glass garage door you can work in the winter with the door closed and get gorgeous light.

A very quick Google yields all the major providers... Clo-Pay, Overhead Door, Jen-Weld... so will a trip to your Yellow Pages.

Glass garage doors are also common in restaurants around here in Montreal, where it gets plenty cold. I don't know how energy efficient it is, as they tend to pump a lot of heat in front of the doors to prevent condensation.

This Old House just featured a local manufacturer of super-insulated garage doors - Try doing a Google search.

Another possible solution that we used for our (music) studio. We have a fake garage door--left the frame and set in a wood panel, and then insulated the wall behind it. We put in french doors on the side of the studio that faces our back yard. They have most of the plusses of an operable weather tight garage door, but cost much less, and make the whole yard look better.

A full-glass door is never going to come close to a traditional garage door regarding insulation. We went with Clopay with 2" thick insulation and it makes a huge difference (from our previous, un-insulated wood garage door). If you are worried about the temperature, I would go with a solid garage door with a row of windows and maybe consider skylights or some other additional source of natural light, since you are building from scratch.

This is unrelated to the door, but we are making a studio out of our rental garage in (very cold) Calgary, and the biggest thing we are doing to make it more insulated is by making a raised floor, so that there is a gap between the concrete and the actual flooring. This will also reduce the draft that comes from the gap between the concrete and the garage door itself. We'd love to install a glass door... but it is a rental

I renovated my mom's 1-door, but 2-car-garage-sized garage into a painting studio (and it has since been turned into a wood-shop). This is in Indiana where it gets plenty cold.

We did surprisingly little to it. Insulation and drywall, lighting and electric.

For the garage door, which is a budget, un-insulated aluminum door with no windows, I merely put screw-hooks into the rafter above the garage door and outfitted a large, quilted moving blanket with rivets. It's still in use today, 5 years later, and the entire space (20x20) is heated by a single electric radiator (those $30, oil filled ones from from the hardware store) and it's more than warm enough.

For more warmth, you could install sheet foam insulation onto the door, but you might need to have your door spring tensioned to accommodate the weight.

Just be sure all edges seal well and you'll be fine!

Oh - just saw the glass part... Have you heard that you can insulate windows with bubble wrap?

I think this will be lovely! I don't have any suggestions that don't just repeat what others have said, so I'll cut straight to my question: can you please please post pictures when it's done?

Thanks, everyone! Of course, the NanaWall doors are gorgeous, but pricey... We do like the Clopay Contemporary doors. And we also like the idea of multiple French doors. We'll see what happens. And, yes, we'll post some pics when we're done!

We did this with our garage. We kept the garage doors because they are lovely to open in the summer and created two french doors that overlook the garden on one of the plain walls. We insulated the walls and added a simple strip at the bottom of the garage door to hold in warmth. We added an indoor dark stained "wood deck" as flooring (to match the deck right outside the garage) and built wall-to-wall bookshelves out of reclaimed wood. We also added a gas fireplace (stove). It is my very favorite place. It took quite a bit of work (we have a friend who is a contractor who did most of it) but it was well worth it in the end. I absolutely love it.

Also, it would be a plus to have lots of glass since they will be facing the north

North light is great for artists, but lots of glass facing north is a nightmare when it comes to energy use. You get no sun in the winter, when you could use it to warm the space, and lots 'o sun in the summer, when you probably don't need it.

We're turning our garage into studio space as well, but because of poorly-planned plumbing above (the kitchen renovation done by the previous owners put the kitchen sink directly above the garage door) and freezing pipes, our insulation needs were more immediate. We thought about panel foam, but found an Owens Corning garage door insulation kit at Home Depot. It's got vinyl-faced fiberglass insulation that installs with adhesive pegs. So far it is working out pretty well.

We're going to come up with a permanent solution over the spring/summer, but for anyone who needs immediate insulation for a regular (not glass) garage door, this kit worked really well for us and was so easy to install. it took less than an hour, and would probably have been even less if we had a standard size garage door (ours is narrower/shorter so we had to trim the insulation sections)

Hello there,

I believe that we have the product that will best serve your needs. We manufacture a product called the WalkThru Garage Door. The website address is www.walkthrugaragedoors.

We have in fact provided a door to a client in Victoria, BC where he converted the garage to their newly purchased home into an art studio. Pictures of said door are not yet posted on our site.

Drop me a word using the Contact link on the site and I will be happy to forward pics along.

I would be hppy to answer any questions pertaining to garage doors and their insluation factors as this is what we do!!!

Have a great day to all!