"Mark Wells" wrote:
I have considered replacing the garage door with large swinging doors. Has
anybody done that?

My garage (which isn't my shop, but then again, it's not really my
garage either; it's more like a random storage area) has swing-out
doors. Two doors, each almost 4 feet wide. There are a few problems.

1) They're old, and sagging badly. When I bought the house (about 4
years ago), I managed to get the worse one pretty straight and then
applied a mess of 1x3 diagonals to hold it in shape. The other door was
a bit better, and only scrapes the outer corner a little bit. Building
replacements is on my "to do" list of projects. I'll get to it someday
(yeah, right, as Charlie's grand-daughter might say).

2) Since they open out, you can't open them if there's anything in the
way. Consider the following. It's early winter and an unexpected
snowstorm has dropped 8 inches of snow on your driveway. Your two
snowshovels are still inside the garage, behind the out-swinging doors.
You need the shovels to clear the driveway so you can open the doors so
you can get the shovels. It's things like this that keep snowshovel
manufacturers in business :-)