Your garage door may be well worn out of its primary purpose, but that doesn’t mean you can’t repurpose an old garage door to give it new life. There are a ton of ways that you can use the panels from your old garage doors around the home, and the durability of garage doors mean that they are reliable for outdoor use. Repurposing is most easily done with wooden garage doors, of course. It will take a skilled hand at operating an electric saw, to be sure, but here are a few great ideas to give you some serious inspiration.
Raised Flower Beds
Fence posts and garage door panels can integrated together to create an attractive surrounding wall for a raised flower bed in your landscaping. The width of many garage doors makes for a perfect wall height, and since it is a garage door you are repurposing, you know your garage door will stand up to the harsh outdoor elements.
Bed Headboard
Some choose to incorporate the square or rectangular paneling design of their old garage doors into their bedroom decor by refinishing the surface of the old door and making it a decorative piece at the head of a bed. The empty spaces left behind from where garage door windows were can even be incorporated at the top of the headboard for an added decorative element.
Dining Room Table
Another option for a refinished wooden door is to use it as the horizontal surface of a dining room table. Mind you, this option requires a great deal of craftsmanship and engineering work. An old wooden garage door can become a beautiful dining room table when it’s sanded, fitted with a bottom support system, affixed to sturdy legs, and finished with a coat or two of satin polyurethane. If your garage door has pockets between the paneling, you can fill these with epoxy to preserve the wooden look.
Bench
One horizontal piece from a garage door is the perfect width for serving as the sitting surface for a long bench, and if your garage door happened to have paneling, your new bench might just already have built-in seating. For standing up your bench, you can cut single rectangles from the same garage door panel so that you’ll have wood pieces that are already the perfect width.
Shelving
Old garage door paneling can serve as a decorative back to a new shelving unit. The garage door panel with the windows intact can make for a nice, decorative backing featuring glass, and the wooden paneling lining the windows offers room for hooks and installing a horizontal shelf or two.
Artwork
Last but not least, an old garage door provides the perfect empty canvas for budding artists looking to make use of a unique material in their artwork. An old door can be painted to create one giant piece of artwork, or the already existed paneling can be used to divide smaller separate pieces of artwork.
