This Area's Housing
Orinda's housing stock centers on 1961, a good decade older than the median across our wider service area (1972). That one fact changes what's on the other side of most garage doors here. A house built in 1961 was almost certainly fitted with a single-panel, one-piece door on side-mounted hardware, or an early sectional retrofit added sometime in the decades since. Either way, the springs, drums, and track brackets on these doors are a different generation from what you'd find on a house built in the 1980s or later.
With 7,386 households in Orinda and a median income of $250,001, this is also an area where a lot of garage doors have been upgraded at least once since the original build - insulated steel in place of old wood, a belt-drive opener swapped in for a chain-drive unit from decades back. But the bones of the structure, the header height, the track spacing, the stud layout around the opening, those often still match 1961 framing. That mismatch between old framing and newer hardware is where we see the oddest service calls.
