The complaint usually arrives sounding like a mystery. Nobody backed into the door. No storm came through. Yet for the last few weeks the left side has scraped and shuddered on the way up while the right side glides, and the noise is worse in the afternoon than it was at breakfast. New rollers went on last year and helped for about a month. Then it came back.
That pattern has a specific cause in this part of Dallas County, and it is not the door.
What the Clay Under Your Slab Is Doing
Irving sits on the Blackland Prairie, and the soil under most of the city is high-plasticity clay. Its defining habit is volume change: it takes on water and expands, dries out and contracts, and it can move vertically by a meaningful amount between a wet spring and a baked August. A slab-on-grade foundation floats on top of that, so it lifts and settles in slow waves rather than staying put.
The movement is never even. One corner of the garage sits under a downspout and a flowerbed that gets watered. Another is shaded, or sits over a line of old fill, or has a live oak twenty feet away pulling moisture out of the subsoil all summer. Different moisture at each corner means different lift at each corner, and the garage opening ends up very slightly out of square. Builders in this area design for it and the house is generally fine. A garage door is less forgiving, because it is a rigid rectangle running inside two tracks that expect the opening to be a rectangle too.
How a Racked Opening Feels From the Inside
Once the frame is out of square, the two vertical tracks are no longer the same distance apart at every height, and they are no longer both plumb. The door hunts for room it does not have. What that produces is a distinctive set of symptoms, all appearing together over a season or two:
- Drag or squeal on one side only, usually at the same height each time
- A daylight gap along the floor that is wide at one end and tight at the other
- Rollers on the bad side wearing far faster than their opposite numbers
- Photo eyes losing alignment more than once in the same year
- A door that binds worse in high summer or after a long wet spell, then eases
- Fresh scrape marks on the outside edge of one vertical track
The seasonal swing is the giveaway. Mechanical wear gets steadily worse and never improves on its own. Slab movement gets worse, gets better, then gets worse again on a yearly rhythm.
Slab Movement or a Bent Track? Two Checks
These two faults produce similar noise and completely different repairs, so it is worth separating them before anyone quotes you.
Look at the shape of the damage. An impact bend is local. You will find a dent, a kink, a flattened flange, usually low down where a car bumper or a bike reached, and the metal above and below it is straight. Slab movement leaves no dent anywhere. The track is still a clean straight line, it is just leaning, and the lean runs the full height.
Then measure the opening, not the door. With the door up, measure across between the two vertical tracks at knee height, at chest height, and near the top radius. On a square opening those three numbers land within about an eighth of an inch of each other. On a racked opening they walk in one direction, tightening or widening as you go up. Add a level held against each track: consistent lean in one direction on a track with no dents is a foundation story, not a collision story.
Why Re-Shimming Beats Replacing the Track
A new track is a straight track. If you bolt it to a frame that is no longer square, you have installed a fresh straight component into a crooked hole and bought yourself the same complaint at a higher price. That is the single most common wasted repair on doors in the older parts of the city.
The work that actually holds is patient alignment against the opening as it sits today. Track brackets get loosened, shimmed out from the jamb by the amount each height needs, and re-plumbed so the door runs at a constant gap top to bottom. The horizontal track and rear hang get checked at the same time, because a racked opening usually pulls the top section out of line too. Then the bottom seal is matched to the real floor line instead of a theoretical flat one, and the photo eyes are reset to their new bracket positions. Only after that do new rollers make sense, and at that point they last their proper life. Off-track repair on these doors is mostly geometry, not parts, and it is the sequence that decides whether the fix survives the next wet season.
What You Can Do, and What to Leave Alone
Safe for a homeowner: check the door for square using the measurements above, photograph the floor gap from outside so you have a record, tighten nothing but note which lag bolts look loose, and get roof drainage away from the garage corners. Moisture control at the perimeter is the one thing that genuinely slows the movement, and it costs almost nothing.
Leave alone: anything on the spring shaft, any cable, and the track bolts themselves. Loosening a track bracket while the door hangs on it is how a section comes down. Also resist turning the opener force up to push through the tight spot. It works for a few weeks and it burns out either the drive gear or the door.
If the door is grinding on one side, book it before it jumps the track completely. Describe the tapered floor gap when you call. That detail tells us to arrive expecting alignment work rather than a parts swap.