Gazebo Screen & Clear Vinyl in Boisbriand

Gazebos in Boisbriand

Boisbriand packs thirty years of suburban backyards into one town. The brick bungalows, cottages and semi-detached homes built between 1970 and 2000 have backyards of classic proportions, often with a wooden deck, and that is where the retail gazebo settled over the years, on its slab or its platform. The models differ from one yard to the next — a gazebo bought in 1995 has nothing in common with one from 2015 — but all share the same principle: an aluminum or steel structure, standard-format panels for that production year, and clear vinyl (MICA film) sold as an option, which wears out long before the structure does.

The Faubourg Boisbriand added a new generation to that picture: homes with PVC windows and patio doors opening onto small yards, where a small-format retail gazebo is the only one that fits. Those yards are tight and exposed to the neighbours’ wind, the opposite of the wider 1970s lots. Permanent wood structures are found mostly on the larger properties of the older housing, wherever someone has had a pool dug or a hot tub installed. A town spread across three decades of construction means three different ways for a gazebo to age, and three ways to approach it.

Screens and vinyl: what gives out in Boisbriand

On the gazebos in 1970s-to-1990s yards, the original clear vinyl has often outlived its useful life: yellowed, stiffened, split at a corner by an October gust. The screen lasts longer, but its spline works out of the frame under wind tension, or the mesh tears where a branch or a chair caught it. In the small new yards of the Faubourg, the film wears out differently: it beats continuously in the wind corridor between the houses and frays at the folds before it even yellows. In every case, we replace the film pane by pane in the original frame and rescreen each mesh panel in its own, after measuring on site — never from the model name.

Structure and access in Boisbriand

A retail gazebo comes apart panel by panel, with no contact with posts or roof, and that is what makes the work possible even when the model no longer exists. On a semi-detached, the backyard is reachable from one side only, often through a narrow fence gate: the panels go through there, or through the house. In the Faubourg, a yard can be too compact to work around the structure: when that is the case, the panels come off one at a time and are redone at the mobile workshop in the driveway. A wood structure beside a pool calls for measuring every opening, because none of them is standard. What gets redone is the panels; the structure stays standing.

Wind, sun, insects: choosing in Boisbriand

The pressure varies from one street to the next. A 1970s yard backing onto a woodlot keeps its mosquitoes and no-see-ums active late into the evening, and a gazebo meant for evenings there deserves fine mesh. A Faubourg yard, open and squeezed between two houses, suffers instead from wind and shadeless sun: the film yellows and beats, and aluminum mesh holds up better than fibreglass. The film goes up when the yard stops being used in the fall; it comes off in spring if you want the gazebo’s airflow back, and stays up if what you are cutting is wind, year-round.