Garage Door Headers for Dummies

Temporary wall

Over the years we've often seen references to a site calling itself DoItYourself.com, but have spent precious little time actually browsing there. That all ended not long ago when we found some clueless English major from eHow.com who cited one of the posts in a how-to article about plumbing, a post that – to be frank – was the equal of anything we ever saw at eHow for utter bullshit. We entered a single search term, "headers," and back came a chunk of unmitigated garbage called "How to Replace a Garage Door Header" by someone calling herself Jen S.

Jen was considered "DoItYourself Staff" when she barfed up this rubbish back in 2011, at the time claiming to have,

"...experience writing on a broad range of topics... [including] home improvement, car sales, personal finance, and digital cameras."

We hope her other topics are more familiar to her! But on to the question... If you're gonna replace a garage door header, or any header for that matter, you need to ensure that the structure above that header is supported throughout the process. What most knowledgeable people do is either build a temporary wall with its own header or create a header replacement supported by jacks (and we don't mean the jack out of your car's trunk). That is not, however, where Jen went.

No, Jen's solution was to,

"Support the ceiling of the garage using some lumber."

Uhhh, yeah: that's good information... NOT! Its idiocy, however, pales alongside Jen's further instructions, which include such brilliant suggestions as,

• "Take out the header by sawing through the center piece." – We weren't aware that headers have "pieces," Jen!
• "You will need to remove the whole piece of the header... " – Duh.
• "Push the new header into place. " – It's a little more complicated than that, Jen!
• "This header should be an inch and a half higher than the garage door, and 9 inches wider than the door." – Shouldn't it be the same size as the header you removed (assuming, of course, that the previous header was correctly sized)?
• "Take some 2x4's, and use these to add 3 rows of supporting frames around the sides of the door, and just below the header." – Just in case you didn't know, Jen, the jack studs are already there: you just made the opening nine inches narrower!

Jen never said a word about any cripples, ignored header dimensions, had nothing to say about how to actually construct a header, and didn't bother to tell you to take away the "lumber" supporting the ceiling when done. But hey: an "expert reviewer" named H. R. Helm just looked this crap over two months ago? Yeah, sure he did... we think he deserves a Dumbass of the Day award right along with Jen for their joint contribution to the stupidification of the internet!

DDIY - FRAMING