This content is a sponsored collaboration with Wessex Garage Doors, specialists in premium garage doors, offering supply, installation and maintenance services for homeowners throughout the southeast. Here, they share their expertise on GRP garage doors and the benefits of this material for customisation.
The garage door is one of the most visible elements of a home’s exterior, meaning it’s a crucial focal point and a contributor to your property’s value. When you’re investing in a custom garage door, you need a material that delivers both in terms of looks and durability.
Timber has long been the traditional choice for bespoke garage doors, valued for its natural beauty and classic appeal. However, wood brings with it a host of well-documented maintenance needs and performance limitations that can quickly erode its initial appeal.
GRP (also known as Glass Reinforced Plastic) represents the modern, superior solution for custom garage doors, offering all the aesthetic flexibility of traditional timber without any of the pitfalls, delivering exceptional lifetime value and durability. In this guide, Wessex Garage Doors explain the unique benefits GRP offers to garage door design.
Assessing the true lifetime value over initial price
There's a common misconception that GRP garage doors always carry a higher upfront cost than their timber alternatives. It’s true that pricing can vary depending on the complexity of the design and the size of the door itself, but the real story emerges when you examine the total cost of ownership over the door's lifetime. Timber garage doors, despite their initial charm, come with hidden costs that build up relentlessly over the years.
Wooden doors, for example, require repainting or re-staining at least once a year, sometimes two depending on the climate where you live. The cost of the labour and the materials can soon add up to be a significant, and ongoing, expense. Similarly, moisture can cause warping, swelling, and sticking, often necessitating professional adjustments to keep the door working properly.
Perhaps most seriously, timber's vulnerability to rot, pest infestation, and splitting can lead to you needing to replace the door entirely much sooner than necessary, turning what seemed like a cost-effective choice into a recurring financial drain.
GRP garage doors eliminate virtually all of these ongoing expenses. Aside from the occasional wipe down with soap and water, GRP requires zero maintenance, and there’s no repainting or re-staining to worry about as the laminate finish is long-lasting and weather resistant. This is the true meaning of "fit and forget”. Once it’s installed, you can enjoy your custom garage door for decades without intervention or additional cost.
Performance and durability that wood can’t match
GRP offers several benefits over wood in terms of its performance as well as maintenance. Unlike timber, which can absorb moisture from rain, humidity, and temperature fluctuations, GRP is impervious to water. GRP also handles the extreme temperature swings characteristic of British weather without contracting or expanding, so your garage door maintains a consistent, perfect fit throughout every season.
Security is another area where GRP excels. The combination of a tough GRP skin over a solid, high-density core delivers exceptional impact resistance that often surpasses many solid or engineered timber constructions. Would-be intruders will find your garage door far more resistant to forced entry attempts than traditional wooden alternatives, which gives you peace of mind.
Bespoke design without compromise
When it comes to achieving truly bespoke garage door designs, timber faces several further limitations. Traditional carving and joinery techniques are, of course, possible but they’re time consuming and often costly. Creating intricate textures or perfectly consistent finishes becomes prohibitively expensive or simply impossible, depending on the design you want.
GRP's moulding process, on the other hand, revolutionises what's possible in custom garage door design. Intricate panel configurations, raised detailing, and complex features can all be replicated with absolute precision and consistency. Modern GRP manufacturing techniques are also capable of producing authentic-looking wood grain textures that are so realistic they're virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
Whether you want the warmth of traditional oak, the richness of mahogany, or contemporary smooth finishes for your home, GRP delivers a flawless replica that’s designed to last and can be tailored to your home’s architecture.
The definitive modern choice
GRP garage doors excel precisely where wooden doors often fall short. They deliver unmatched customisation possibilities, exceptional resilience to British weather, and incredible lifetime value. For homeowners who want a truly bespoke door that looks great from day one, and requires virtually no maintenance, GRP is unquestionably the material to choose.
