September 29, 2026 · By Travis Nech
That dip in the brickwork over your garage door isn't settling. It isn't cosmetic. And it doesn't fix itself.
If the brick above your garage opening is sagging, bowing, or stepping down in a stair-step crack pattern, you're looking at a failing lintel — the hidden support beam carrying every course of brick over that opening. On a standard two-car garage in Texas, that lintel is holding up somewhere around 1,500 to 2,500 pounds of masonry. When it gives up, gravity doesn't negotiate.
Why garage doors are the #1 spot for lintel failure
Garage openings are the widest spans of unsupported brick on most Texas homes — 16 feet on a two-car garage, sometimes 18 on the big ones out in the newer Frisco and Prosper builds. Every other window and door in the house sits under a shorter, lighter load. The garage lintel does the heaviest lifting on the whole wall, and it does it with the least margin for error.
Add Texas weather to that. The steel lintels in most DFW and Fort Hood corridor homes were installed bare or with a coat of primer that wore off decades ago. Moisture gets behind the brick, the steel rusts, rust expands — iron oxide takes up roughly six times the volume of the steel it replaced — and that expansion jacks the brick courses apart from the inside. Masons call it "rust jacking," and the garage opening is where it shows up first because that's where the longest piece of steel lives.
The warning signs, in order of how bad things are
Stage 1 — hairline cracking at the corners.
Thin cracks radiating from the top corners of the garage opening, or a single horizontal crack running along the mortar joint just above the door. The lintel is starting to deflect. This is the cheap stage. Don't skip it.
Stage 2 — visible sag.
Stand back at the curb and sight along the brick courses above the door. If the soldier course (that row of vertical bricks right over the opening) dips in the middle, the lintel is bending. Put a straight 2x4 or a level across it — anything more than a quarter-inch of dip over 16 feet means the steel has lost its fight.
Stage 3 — stair-step cracks and shifting brick.
Cracks that step through mortar joints in a staircase pattern above the corners, brick faces popping or spalling, or the soldier course starting to rotate outward. At this point the lintel isn't just deflecting — it's failing. Bricks can and do fall from this stage. Keep cars and kids clear of the opening.
Stage 4 — the "somebody already tried to fix it" stage.
We see this all over older neighborhoods in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Temple: a previous owner bolted an angle iron or a steel plate across the face of the brick, or smeared the cracks with caulk. The caulk hides the symptom. The bolted-on steel just moves the stress somewhere else. Neither one fixes the lintel.
The opening has to be re-supported from the inside, with the brick lifted back to level and the load carried the way the wall was designed to carry it. That means shoring the masonry, removing the failed steel, installing proper support, and relaying the disturbed courses so the wall looks like nothing ever happened — seamless brick, no hardware showing, no bolted-on plates.
That's exactly what our LintelLOCK system was built for: a permanent, internal correction that lifts the sag back out and locks the opening in for the long haul. No exterior brackets. No plates. No angle irons bolted across your brick. When we're done, the wall looks like it did the day the house was built — only now it's actually supported.
Honest answer from fifty years in brick: Stage 1 can sit for a season while you plan. Stage 2 should be on the calendar this month. Stage 3 is a "don't park under it" situation, and you should get a mason's eyes on it this week. A garage lintel doesn't fail politely — when the steel finally lets go, courses drop, and a falling soldier course is a genuine safety problem, not just a repair bill.
Cost-wise, catching it at Stage 1 or 2 is a straightforward lintel correction. Waiting until bricks are falling turns it into a lintel correction plus a partial rebuild of the courses above the opening. Early is always cheaper. Always.
Can I just caulk the cracks above my garage door?
You can, and plenty of folks do — but caulk doesn't carry 2,000 pounds of brick. It hides the crack while the lintel keeps deflecting underneath. When the repair finally happens, the caulked joints have to be cut out anyway.
Will my homeowner's insurance cover a sagging lintel?
Usually not. Insurers treat lintel failure as wear and maintenance, not a sudden event. Worth a call to your agent, but don't count on it.
Is the brick above a garage door load-bearing?
The brick veneer itself isn't holding up the house — but it is holding up itself, and all of its weight over that 16-foot opening bears on the lintel. When the lintel fails, the veneer is what comes down.
How do I know if it's the lintel or foundation settlement?
Foundation settlement cracks usually run diagonally from the corners of the whole structure and show up at multiple openings. Lintel failure is localized to the one wide opening — the garage — with sag or cracking centered over it. A mason who's seen both can tell in about thirty seconds on site.
Do you service my area?
We run DFW daily — Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, Irving, Garland, Frisco, McKinney, and the surrounding metro — plus the Fort Hood corridor: Temple, Belton, Killeen, Harker Heights, Copperas Cove, and Waco. If you're anywhere along I-35 between Denton and Waco, we'll get eyes on it.
Get it looked at before it gets worse
If the brick over your garage door is doing anything on this list, don't guess from the driveway. Text us a photo — a straight-on shot of the opening and one sighting along the courses — and we'll tell you straight what stage you're at and what it takes to fix it.
📞 Call or text (817) 523-1540 — ask for Cheryl. Free evaluation, honest answer, no pressure. If it's fine, we'll tell you it's fine.
Cracks are ugly — let Champion Brick Repair fix them right, with mortar matched to your home and a lifetime warranty.
