What is a ballpark repair cost for a sagging lintel over the garage door?
3 pros!
Question by dennisseeman: My client is selling their house and the buyer's inspector pointed out "the overhead garage door lintel is sagging and there are brickwork cracks as a result". In his opinion the lintel used when the house was constructed in 2008 was not heavy enough. They are asking for seller concessions as my client is not interested in making repairs. How much is a reasonable amount for this type of repair?
Answered by LCD: Depends a lot on type of construction (i.e. is this a brick fcade or solid brick construction), and whether the brick joints have cracked through or not - and if the header beam (if a frame house with brick facade) is also sagging or not. Also if there is room for lintel reinforcement or if it as set as low as the bottom of the door header so reinforcing underneath would reduce headroom for car entry.
Depending on what a Structural Engineer determined, might require total replacement of the header beam and removal and replacement of a substantial amount of overhead brick (or partial wall replacement if solid brick construction), a lesser evil would be sagging lintel with only minor brick joint cracking on a frame house where replacing or reinforcing the lintel and repointing the brick might work - in between would be partial facade brick removal and replace lintel and redo the removed brick.
Your client (since you are on the lower risk side of this deal) could always counter with a price adjustment which is NOT on the convservative side (so he/she loses less off the price), whereas a buyer would have to use a very conservative estimate or have a firm repair bid in hand to be sure they are not going to come out on the short side of the deal. To be meaningful and in the reasonable range, lacking an actual cost estimate or bid from an engineer or contractor being presented by the buyer, I would throw out (depending on how urgent making this deal work is to your client) $500-1000 range for a brick facade on frame construction, or $1000-2000 if a solid brick house where the wall will have to be partially dismantled to replace the lintel (which in that case probably also acts as the header, along with arched brick construction). Less than that is likely to be considered not serious, more and you risk overshooting what they are looking for. Of course, if they feel more is justified then they can present a firm estimate from an engineer (a construction cost estimate) or a FIRM BID (not just an off-the-cuff guesstimate) from a contractor for what it is expected to cost.
here is a link to another question along that line which is similar in response (since I did that one too) but might have a detail or two of interest:
https://answers.angieslist.com/What-cost-replacing-lintel-garage-door-q2...
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