What It Costs
Lantana's housing is young for this part of the service area - most of it went up around 2007, which means the garage door on most houses here is the same door and the same cable that came with the house. That cable has never been replaced, because nobody replaces a cable that hasn't snapped yet. A straight cable swap on a torsion-spring door is a different job than a spring replacement, and it's priced differently - less labor, less risk, a shorter visit. If the drum or the bottom bracket got chewed up from a frayed cable running loose, that adds parts and time. We don't quote a number here without seeing the door, because a single-cable fray and a double-door cable-and-drum replacement aren't the same invoice, and nobody wants a guess that's wrong by a factor of two.
Booking a Visit
We run out of Watauga, about 17 miles from Lantana. That's not a same-block response, and we're not going to pretend it is - if your cable has already snapped and the door is sitting on the floor, tell us that when you call so we can plan the drive accordingly. Booking itself is simple: describe what the door is doing (won't open, drooping on one side, a loud snap you heard) and we schedule from there. We don't keep a branch in Lantana. The crew and the parts come from Watauga every time.
Can You Do This Yourself
A garage door spring is under enough stored tension to hurt you badly. The cable runs under that same tension, routed around a drum that's locked to a torsion shaft. Loosening the wrong bolt on a wound spring, or letting a cable go slack while the door is still up, is how people lose fingers or get hit by a door panel. If the cable has already snapped and the door is down, leave it down and leave the opener unplugged. That's the one piece of DIY that's actually safe to do yourself - everything past that point involves tools (winding bars, vise grips, clamps) that most garages don't have and most homeowners have never used under load.
The Complications
On a lot of these original 2007 installs, the cable isn't the only thing original - the drum, the bottom brackets, and sometimes the spring are all still factory. If a cable has been fraying for a while before it lets go, it can wear a groove into the drum or bend the bottom bracket as it whips loose, and either one turns a cable job into a cable-plus-parts job. Double garage doors add another wrinkle: two cables, two drums, and if one side failed from age, the other side is the same age and close behind it. We'll tell you straight if the smart move is replacing both sides now rather than making a second trip in six months.
