Gazebo Screen & Clear Vinyl in Belœil

Gazebos in Belœil

In the Belœil neighbourhoods built between 1970 and 1995, the garden shelter is not the age of the house: it was added to the yard long afterwards, and it is the date of that addition, not the date of the street, that decides the state of the film. Whole streets of bungalows and then of two-storey homes, lots of comparable size, and in a good share of those yards a retailer gazebo — aluminum or steel structure, standard-size panels — put up by an earlier generation of owners. They are not all from the same year, but they belong to the same family of products and they wear the same way: the clear film first, the screen panels after. It is the most common profile in town, and by far the simplest to work on.

The old village core, near the church and the Richelieu river, gives the other picture. The lots are laid out differently, often longer and more planted, and the garden shelter there is more often a permanent wooden structure, built to measure, with bays that do not repeat. The new developments round out the set: shorter yards, young trees that cut neither wind nor sun yet, recent gazebos in standard sizes whose film takes everything with nothing in the way. A retailer shelter is surveyed by size, a wooden structure bay by bay: it is that distinction, not the age of the street, that changes the visit.

Screens and vinyl: what gives out in Belœil

On these retailer shelters the film has often been redone once already, by hand, with a roll cut roughly and fastened over the frame. It holds for a season, then the vinyl starts working, pulls on each of its fastening points and tears in a star around every one of them. Putting it right means going back to the original principle: one piece per bay, cut to exact size, held the way the frame was designed to hold it. The screen panels on the same shelter are handled alongside — mesh that has lost its tension, an open corner, spline out of its groove — and rescreened in their frames. A gazebo bay is tensioned lying down, never upright: what sets the length of the visit is the flat ground available beside the structure, not the size of the yard.

Structure and access in Belœil

In a neighbourhood built all at once the arithmetic is different: a shelter bought in one go does not have one tired bay, it has a whole set of the same age, and it is that set that has to be surveyed. The survey is still done panel by panel, because a retailer gazebo may advertise standard sizes while two neighbouring bays differ depending on where they sit in the structure. In the old core, access needs more attention: longer lots, hedges, fences, and sometimes a wooden structure with panels wider than the yard gate. We check the way out before unhooking the first one.

Wind, sun, insects: choosing in Belœil

The Richelieu and the planted lots of the old core mean spring is fought against very small biting flies, the ones that go through an ordinary mesh as if it were not there. On a gazebo the mesh is only half the question: split film lets through as much as a holed panel, and both are surveyed together or the shelter stays unusable. In the newer neighbourhoods the problem changes: young trees, open yards, full afternoon sun on the same face all season. That face is the one that yellows first, and it is the one that decides when the film has to be redone.