The first idea for your old garage door is to use it to build a table! The flat surface and potential flexibility of the garage door (if it was paneled) can make a great stand in table with just a few adjustments. You may need to rework the hinges and repaint or sand any parts that have gotten scuffed up of the years, but without too much work at all you could have a perfect outdoor table for all your garden parties and backyard barbecues. It may not be the fanciest table you see, but it will be a great way to show your handiwork and resourcefulness at being able to turn something as ordinary as a garage door into something you gather around for years to come.
Another thing you can do (only with wooden garage doors) is throw them in the wood chipper. If there is no paint on them or the paint is not bad for the environment then there is no reason that you can’t take off the hinges or take out any metal parts and use the old wood to mulch your garden in the coming year or to help light fires in winter, etc. All that wood won’t be going to waste if you have a use for a garage door’s worth of wood chips and plus you’ll have the fun of breaking down your old garage door into yet another useful thing.
For the steel and aluminum garage doors out there you may not want to use a wood chipper, but you might try and take the welding torch to them. Let your creative side out and get to sculpting some beautiful junkyard style stuff with your old garage door. You’ll have lots of material to used and might even turn it into something worth tons of money. You also might just turn it into a pile of melted and cut metal, but then again you’ll never know until you try and you’ve really got nothing to lose. Metal sculptures are all the rage so why not make christmas presents for the whole family out of your garage door this year or just create a sculpture for yourself with the dented garage door panels you have left. Either way you’ll be doing something productive with it all and in the end if it ends up not being worthwhile you can still recycle it.
The last thing you can do with your old garage door is just recycle it. It may seem boring compared to the others, but it is certainly easier in many respects. Recycling your garage door will have it out of the way quickly and can even be done without lifting a finger if you get the garage door professionals who are installing your new garage door to take it away. Otherwise you may need to check your towns calendars and guidelines on disposing of garage doors, but it will still probably be faster and easier than throwing it in the woodchopper or learning how to weld.
There are tons of things that you can do with your garage door once it is no longer being used to keep your garage off limits. The possibilities are nearly endless and you surely have some ideas of your own. Feel free to share them in the comments and remember to be safe when operating those welding tools and the wood chipper. If you are still on the tamer side of things also remember there is no shame in recycling your garage door instead of turning it into an avant-garde sculpture. In fact its quite a bit easier and may even end up saving you a lot of hassle if you go through your local garage door professional and have them take it away when they bring and install your new garage door.