I noticed that the Expo Design Center in Fairfax, VA had shower doors from Bel Pre Glass in Rockville, MD. The difference in getting the doors from Expo (the high end HD), and from Bel Pre is that the door size was fixed. We ended up getting our shower door from another company, using a 10% off coupon that we found online, and got the door in the size that we wanted. (The big box door was 24" wide, and we wanted one wide enough to qualify as handicapped accessible.)

I think your best bet is to Google garage doors and the city or county you live in if reasonably large. You will get the people that know your area and weather. They can answer your questions pronto.

Thanks, mooring_girl, for the feedback on JeldWen. I should have realized that aging paint on fiberglass would be an issue. The big question is whether any of the factory finishes will look decent with our house paint, since the deck is at the front of the house, not the more private back side. We will have to wait to see the dealer's finish samples. ajm51, we live on the Monterey Peninsula, never too hot or too cold, and no air conditioning, so a sweating metal-clad door shouldn't be an issue.

I live in Massachusetts. I echo palimpset's comment that if you have an inswing door with a storm door, you have the same snow blockage issue because the snow would block the storm door just as easily as it would block your outswing door. I have that happen on my back door all the time in the winter (we use our front door as the main entry/exit all the time anyway). When we put in a new doorway to go out to our enclosed porch, I opted for the outswing door for the reasons to have more space in the room and swing out into the porch. We got a Therma-Tru door with a lovely glass panel for about $900. The only thing the contractor commented on about the outswing was the effect of the elements (rain, snow, etc) on the door. I wish I could recall his exact words--it was something about the significance of Therma-Tru's warranty and the fact that it was an outswing door going "outside", usually means that more of the door would be hit by the elements. If it is a door going to the outside, our guy implied that to not impact the warranty, then it would need to have a roof overhang or something to protect it. (If you think about it, when you outswing the door, the whole door gets pelted with the rain than when you inswing the door and the whole door doesn't get hit.) Our contractor said that because our outswing door was going into an enclosed porch, the weather effect was not an issue for us. It sounds to me like your contractor isn't clearly telling you exactly why he's unhappy about the outswing. Maybe it is harder for him to get it to 'hang' right in that location, or maybe it's because he has to do more up front treatment (paint, etc) for the weather protection. I suppose you could voice it back to him as a question "If it were your doorway, why would you install an inswing door in this location instead of an outswing one?" and see what he says. The "snow" argument seems less of an argument to me than a rain/storm door argument. If you can't have a storm door, then the finish on the outswing door is going to take the brunt of rain and might not last long.