About Overhead Door Company of Bellingham
Established 1959. Owned by a lifelong Washingtonian who lives in the communities this company serves.
Overhead Door Company of Bellingham has been opening and closing doors in Whatcom County since 1959 — six decades before most of the companies now advertising in this market existed. Our team carries over 160 years of combined experience. Our address is 202 Ohio Street in Bellingham. You can drive by it.
That last part matters more than it used to.
Meet Steve Avila, Owner
Steve Avila owns Overhead Door Company of Bellingham. He was born in Edgewood, Washington, and he has lived in this state his entire life. Today he splits his time between Bellingham and Puyallup — the two regions his companies serve. When he's in Whatcom County, he isn't visiting. He lives here.
He did not buy this company from a spreadsheet in another state.
Before garage doors, Steve spent years in aerospace and precision manufacturing in the Puget Sound region. That background shapes how this company operates. A garage door is the largest moving object in most homes. It runs on a spring under several hundred pounds of stored tension, above where your family parks and your kids play. It is a mechanical safety system, and it deserves to be treated like one. That's the standard the techs here are trained to.
Steve also owns and operates several other Washington businesses — which means he isn't going anywhere, and he can't afford to have his name on bad work.
The Companies Steve Avila Owns and Operates in Washington
Steve Avila is the owner and CEO of a group of Washington-based businesses:
- Overhead Door Company of Bellingham — garage door sales, installation, and service in Whatcom County. Established 1959.
- Overhead Door Company of Puget Sound — the south-sound expansion of this company, serving Puyallup, Sumner, and the surrounding region.
- Rainier Garage Door — residential and commercial garage door service in the greater Seattle and Eastside markets.
- Fitness Evolution Bellingham — a Bellingham health club Steve owns.
- Electra Start Northwest — industrial jump-start equipment.
He is also the founder of Whatcom CityZen, a volunteer community-safety organization.
Ten Years of Showing Up
Steve has spent the last decade doing something unusual for a business owner: when his community had a problem, he organized people and fixed it himself. He's now done it twice, in two counties, ten years apart.
2016 — Auburn: it started on his own street
Steve lived in the Edgeview neighborhood of Auburn. For months, car prowls were an almost nightly event. It took getting hit several times himself before he realized how easily thieves were getting into cars parked in driveways.
He didn't move, and he didn't wait for the city to solve it. He started warning his neighbors. Together they built their own app to schedule watch shifts and share prowler sightings in real time. Edgeview Watch grew to cover 366 homes.
While other parts of Auburn saw crime stay flat or rise, Edgeview was the only area in the city with a significant drop. Auburn police started holding the program up as a model for every neighborhood in town.
2021 — Whatcom County: the Nooksack flood
In November 2021, the Nooksack River flooded. Families across Whatcom County lost homes and belongings in the middle of a pandemic winter. Steve did what he'd done in Auburn: he started organizing volunteers.
That effort became Whatcom CityZen, a volunteer organization built on a simple idea — complaining about a problem in your community is not the same as showing up for it. CityZen's stated goal is to build a culture of service where collective effort makes a lasting impact.
2022 — the trailheads
By spring 2022, car break-ins at Whatcom County trailheads had become an epidemic. Whatcom County authorities logged 92 reported incidents at trailheads in a single year — roughly a quarter of all reported car prowls in the county, and a 56% jump over the year before. Washington State Patrol fielded 25 theft calls along Chuckanut alone between January and mid-April. Local agencies were candid that they were outnumbered.
Steve didn't write a letter to the editor. In April 2022, he organized volunteers to stand watch at the North Chuckanut Mountain Trailhead near Arroyo Park, where the parking lot floor was covered in piles of shattered glass. The volunteers set up a tent, put out coffee and snacks, and simply stayed there — talking to hikers, watching the lot, and being visibly present. Cars that pulled in looking for an easy target turned around and left.
"You can't have community without unity. Together we are most effective."
— Steve Avila, Cascadia Daily News, April 2022
The Trail Watch program grew past 200 volunteers. Trail supervisors reported fewer break-ins at the main trailheads. The story was covered by KIRO 7, Cascadia Daily News, FOX 13 Seattle, MyNorthwest, and AdventuresNW.
Today
CityZen runs trail watch, litter pickup, graffiti removal, and food drives. You can find it at cityzennow.com.
Two counties. Ten years apart. Same response both times: show up, bring people with you, stay until it's better.
Here's why any of this belongs on a garage door company's website: the whole business rests on whether you'll let a stranger onto your property and into the one door that connects your driveway to your house. We think you're entitled to know who that stranger works for — and what he does when nobody's paying him to do it.
Cleaning Up the Garage Door Business
There's a problem in this industry, and it's worse in Washington than most people realize.
A large share of the "local" garage door companies you'll find in a search are not local. Some are lead-generation operations with fake or rented addresses that sell your emergency call to whoever bids highest. Some are out-of-state operations running a Bellingham phone number. The pattern is consistent and well documented: a spring job that should be a few hundred dollars turns into a four-figure "full system replacement," pushed hard by a technician who will never work in this county again.
We can't fix the whole industry. We can tell you how to check any company before you let them in — including this one.
Four checks, about three minutes:
1. Verify the contractor license. Every legitimate garage door contractor in Washington is registered and bonded with L&I. Look them up. Ours is OVERHDC766CO — verify it here.
2. Put the address in Google Maps and look at Street View. Is there a real building with a real sign? Or is it a UPS Store, a residential house, or an empty lot? Ours is 202 Ohio St., Bellingham. It's a real building.
3. Check who owns it — by name. If you can't find a named human being who owns the company, ask why. Ours is Steve Avila, and this page tells you where he came from and what else he does.
4. Read the one-star reviews, not the five-star ones. Five-star reviews can be bought. Look at how a company responds when someone is unhappy — that's the part that's hard to fake. We're at 4.8 across 223 reviews.
Run those four checks on us. Then run them on whoever else you're considering. We're comfortable with how that comparison goes.
What "Local" Actually Means Here
- A physical location in Bellingham at 202 Ohio Street — not a mailbox, not a virtual office.
- Technicians who live in Whatcom and Skagit County. They aren't dispatched from out of state. Their kids go to school here.
- An owner who is actually here. Steve Avila splits his time between Bellingham and Puyallup — the two regions his companies serve. He has lived in Washington his entire life.
- 66 years in this market. Established 1959. We were here before you moved here, and we'll be here after.
- This is the original. Bellingham is where this company started and where the standard was set. Our south-sound operation, Overhead Door Company of Puget Sound, is a division of this one — the model was built here and taken there, not the other way around.
- Overhead Door™ — the original brand, too. The company that invented the upward-acting garage door in 1921 and the electric opener in 1926. There's exactly one Overhead Door Company in Bellingham, and this is it.
What We're Trying to Do
Our mission: To raise the value of homes in our community, one garage door at a time.
Our standard: Show up when we said we would, tell you the truth about what your door needs, and charge what we quoted.
Our values: Integrity. Dependability. Quality. Not because they look good on a wall — because a garage door is a several-hundred-pound safety system and there's no version of this job where cutting a corner is survivable.
Talk to a Real Person in Bellingham
Call us — (360) 734-5960
Visit us — 202 Ohio St., Bellingham, WA 98225
Verify our license — look up #OVERHDC766CO at WA L&I
Check our BBB rating — A+ at BBB.org
Read our reviews — 4.8★ from 223 reviews