Carriage style doors are generally all built on a base panel made of a 1" to 1 3/8" x 2 1/2" to 3" wood frame. High quality doors (Hahn Woodworking) make the frame out of a decay resistant hardwood (Meranti mahogany, etc.), medium quality doors (Designer Doors) use Douglas Fir, and the lower quality doors (Overhead) use hemlock. Designer doors makes two models A & B in order to better compete with the brands above and below. The basic frame is faced with with 1/4" plywood usually on both sides (Designer only on inside). The plywwod is often luan mahogany but some is "super-ply"(Designer) The best doors prime all sides of all components before assembly (Hahn) some only after assembly (Designer) and some only partially (Overhead). Wood styles and rails and T&G paneling are added to the outer face of this basic door unit. Hahn uses clear Spanish cedar full 1" thick styles & rails butted against 3/4" T&G paneling with biscuit glued joinery and face-grain wood plugs over recessed screws into the framing. They claim 200 screws per door. Each panel is assembled separately. Designer uses clear western red cedar 5/8" thick styles and rails over-laid on top of 9/16" thick T&G paneling with putty over recessed screws . The entire door is built and then cut into separate panels. Overhead uses clear western red cedar 3/4" thick and T&G paneling glued and blind nailed. The total thickness varies from 2 1/2" to 2 7/8". Of course the front edge of this door assembly aligns (in both directions) with the inside corner of the trimmed door opening so the tracks must be set to accommodate this thickness. Polystyrene foam board insulation fills the door panel cavities. Some doors use the extruded kind (Styrofoam) and some use the expanded type (white beadboard). R values range from 5 to 7.7 The more expensive custom doors (Hahn & Designer) will consider a 9'x8' high door to be a standard size. The cheaper doors usually consider 9'x7' high door to be standard. Some provide chain drive openers, others provide belt drive openers. Some use Chamberlain Co. but Overhead has their own brand. Some provide a 3/4 hp motor, others 1/2 hp. Some use overhead torsion springs, others extension springs along the rails. There are too many glass options to describe. Some use a heavier galvanized steel track. Some offer powder coated tracks. Designer has weep holes, the others don't. All of the doors are installed by the manufacturers or their authorized agents. I would guess the approximate cost of a 9'x8' door, installed, would range from $5,000 to $2,000 assuming decorative paneling and glass. These manufacturers use different details at the horizontal panel joints with differing degrees of overlap. I'll post the details if I ever find them. Of course the manufacturers may have changed their designs in the past two years.

Just updating in case anyone else is looking for steel carriage house doors with a stained wood look... I couldn't find anyone in our area who carried the Raynor brand but was able to look at both the Amaar and the Clopay doors. Amaar's "Classica" line comes in a dark woodgrain finish. When looking at images of the doors online, I was just about convinced to purchase the Amaar Classica Lucerne with Seine windows. I thought it would be PERFECT. But, because garage doors are so big you can't NOT see them, I decided I really wanted to look at samples of the actual doors before I bought. I'm so glad I did because as soon as I saw the Amarr door in real life I knew I would not be happy with it. While the overall color (a reddish mahogany shade) would have been fine, the Amaar "wood graining" simply was not at all realistic. Amaar apparently impresses the wood graining into the rolled steel metal before the door panels are formed and then the paint is baked on (or something like that). Then, they stamp the door panels out of the embossed and prepainted sheet metal. The result is that all of the "wood graining" runs in the same direcetion (horizontally) even where the door is stamped out to look like it is made with vertical and/or diagonally placed pieces of wood. The Amaar doors MIGHT look okay from 40 or 50 feet away but, as soon as I walked into the shop and saw the door (from a distance of about 20 feet) I knew it simply would not do. Having the "grain" running in the wrong direction was just too jarring. So I went looking at Clopay as an alternative. It turns out the Clopay's Coachman style doors ARE NOT available in the stained wood colors. Instead, if you want a stained wood color, your only option at Clopay is their "Gallery Collection" which does not include any of the crossbuck styles which is what I REALLY wanted. Still, the Gallery collection comes in two stained wood colors (medium oak and dark oak) AND they actually emboss the wood grain pattern into the steel so that the portions of the door that are supposed to simulate vertical pieces of wood have vertical graining and the parts that are supposed to look like horizontal pieces of wood have horizontal graining. I wasn't too impressed with the dark oak color. It real life it is sort of the color of melted chocolate icecream, i.e., a slightly greyish brown. The medium oak color looked a lot more realistic, a golden medium brown. It might be a tad shiney for some folks but real stained oak finished with a glossy varnish can be shiney as well so I wasn't put off by the shine. I was just disappointed that the Coachman styles (which include crossbuck doors) don't come in the stained wood colors. I also checked out the Jeldwen composite garage doors that are supposed to be stainable. I decided against them for two reasons. First, we would have to have them stained and varnished on-site which would mean either finding someone competant to do the job or doing it ourselves... and of course that meant I couldn't see how well the composite would actually take stain. I even asked the salesman if he had any previous customers who had stained their garage doors that he might call and ask if I could take a drive by and look at their doors. No luck. But, what finally put me off was that, just like real wood doors, Jeldwen recommends that if you stain their composite doors, you sanding sand them down lightly every year and revarnish them! Our garage doors face west so for us so ours would probably need even more maintenance. I don't want to do that much maintenance on garage doors. So, ultimately we decided to get the Clopay Gallery doors. With arched windows and the strap hinges, they look pretty good and were not too outrageously expensive. Installed price was right at 5K for all three garage doors (two 9'x8' and one 8'x8') including the three garage door openers. I'll post a picture when I can locate my camera again. No doubt, next week someone somewhere will come out with a metal carriage house door in a crossbuck style where the embossing is made to run exactly like it would on real wood, and it'll be available in a perfect mahogany brown shade with a satin poly finish AND they'll be selling them for 20% less than my Clopay's! If they do, please just don't tell me. LOL!

Thanks for the replies so far, they definitely help. awm, correct, that is a one car garage door to the far left. I definitely think painting the doors all blue might be too much...but your second pic looks decent for sure. oly, yes, at least at this point (since they are so far into the job), the stone has to go all the way up to the top....not sure if it ever was an option to change that. As for the trim detail on that window....actually in pics I saw of other homes that were this model....it was all white, including above the window (where it's blue now). I'm not sure if they have to add a trim piece there still....or whether the pic of the house I saw just had it different there. I would just be concerned about that window having no white framing around it (if I painted it blue) whereas all my other windows on all sides of the house are trimmed in white/linen. The better choice might be to paint the area above the window white. I don't mind the garage doors standing out...but again, I want it to be for the right reasons....not because it's ugly. I think unless you have brown or tan on your house.....wood is always going to draw attention to the doors. I don't think that's bad....we see plenty of pics on Houzz of blue or gray houses with wood doors and they look great. The only wood doors I've seen that are ugly are non-carriage style ones with no windows. It just looks odd to have a big huge wood panel with nothing breaking it up....even if you have brown on your house. I did attach 2 pics of other houses with similar colors that I took yesterday (so in the same light). I just think the white is throwing people off because it's appearing so much brighter (I used one of those garage door manufacturer programs where you can upload a pic of your house and put their door on it). These pics give better visuals of what the white would look like in real life.

i like the color choices. I think a dark amethyst door would look killer w/the green I have a faux wood door that I attached the carriage hardware to. I don't have any good pics at the moment because there are always cars parked in front of it. it's at least 8 years old. I don't think it looks overly fake.