How Local Conditions Play In
Edina's housing stock runs from 1957 through 2005, with the typical house on the median dating to 1975. That's a fifty-year spread, but most of what you'll find on an older block matches the 1960s-70s pattern that shows up across the 48 named areas making up this service area. Garages from that era were framed to the codes of their decade, not to today's, and the jamb clearances, header heights, and slab pitches vary enough that a seal kit bought off a shelf rarely sits flush without trimming.
On top of the framing mismatch, Edina sits in a climate band the federal data marks as cold and severe. That matters more for seals than for almost anything else on the door. Vinyl bottom astragal and jamb weatherstripping are rated for a temperature range, and once the mercury drops hard for weeks at a stretch, the material stiffens, shrinks slightly, and stops compressing against the slab or the frame the way it did when it was new. The draught you feel along the bottom edge in January usually isn't a new gap. It's the same gap that was always there, now with a seal too stiff to fill it.
A door that sealed fine in October can whistle by December without anything on the door itself having broken.
What It Costs
I'm not going to hand you a number here, because the honest answer depends on things I can't see from a FACTS sheet: door width, whether it's a single or double, how many separate seal runs need replacing (bottom astragal, jamb weatherstrip, top seal, and sometimes a vinyl retainer track that's cracked and needs swapping too), and whether the slab itself has settled enough that no seal will sit flush until that's addressed.
What I can tell you is where the cost actually comes from. Bottom seal and retainer replacement is a parts-and-labor job, usually quick. Jamb weatherstripping along both sides and the header is a separate run of material, and on a two-car door that's a fair bit more linear footage than people expect. If the stop molding behind the jamb seal has warped - which happens on older framing more than newer - that's carpentry, not a seal swap, and it changes the job.
The honest limitation: if your garage slab has heaved or settled more than a small amount, no seal kit fixes the draught. That's a concrete problem wearing a weatherstripping disguise, and I'll tell you that on the first look rather than sell you a seal that won't hold.
What to Look At First
Start at the bottom edge with the door closed. Run a hand along the seal where it meets the slab - on a lot of the 1960s-70s stock in this area, that astragal has hardened into something closer to a hard plastic strip than rubber, and it won't flex back when you press it. That's age, not damage, and it's exactly what the cold-severe winters here do to vinyl over a few decades.
Next check the jambs on both sides where the door panel meets the frame. Look for daylight at the corners, especially the top corners where the header seal meets the side jamb seal - that joint is where most draughts actually originate, not along the flat run of weatherstrip. If the house dates toward the earlier end of that 1957 start point, there's a decent chance the original wood jamb has shrunk slightly over the decades, widening the gap the seal was never sized to cover.
Last, check the seal retainer track itself for cracks, not just the rubber insert. A cracked track lets the whole seal twist out of plane even when the vinyl itself is fine. If you can see light through any of these points with the door shut, that's the one worth calling about first.
What Is Going On
A garage door seal doesn't fail all at once. It loses a little compression every winter as the vinyl goes through repeated freeze cycles, and in a cold-severe band like Edina's, that cycle runs hard and long enough most years to accelerate the wear well past what the same part would see somewhere milder. By the time a house is pushing toward that 1975 median build year, the seals have usually been replaced once or twice already, but the retainer tracks and jamb stops - original to the framing - often haven't.
The other piece is that older framing, from the earlier end of that 1957-2005 build range, wasn't always cut to a uniform tolerance. A door that seals fine on one side and draughts on the other usually means the jamb itself is slightly out of square, not that one seal is worse than the other. No amount of seal replacement fixes a square problem - it just buys you a tighter fit around the same misalignment.
Most of what you're chasing with a draughty door in this climate isn't a dramatic failure. It's decades of freeze-thaw doing slow, even work on a part that was never built to last that long in the first place.
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