Gazebo Screen & Clear Vinyl in Montréal-Nord

Gazebos in Montréal-Nord

Montréal-Nord was built tight, between 1950 and 1970, in brick duplexes, triplexes and small apartment buildings. The backyards that came with them are small, often shared between units and hemmed in by the neighbours’ balconies, and the gazebo that goes in is nearly always the retailer’s: a boxed steel or aluminum frame in a compact format, set up on the slab or gravel at the back of the yard. It matters because outdoor space is scarce, and its panels work hard: in a yard a few metres across a panel is also a partition people squeeze past, and the sun thrown back off the neighbouring brick finishes the job. A gazebo in a dense yard ages fast, but it ages in the places we know how to repair.

The borough’s other outdoor space is the balcony, and a balcony on a 1950s–1970s apartment building doesn’t take a gazebo. What you find there instead are screen panels installed to close off the end of a balcony or a small deck over a garage — standard aluminum frames or frames cut to measure — and sometimes a clear vinyl (MICA film) so the corner stays usable at the first cold snap. These setups are the same trade as the gazebo: mesh in a frame, film in a section. In a district where several units stack on top of one another, the wear repeats floor by floor, and a triplex owner can end up with the panels of three balconies to redo in the same year.

Screens and vinyl: what gives out in Montréal-Nord

On a retail gazebo wedged into a Montréal-Nord yard, the original clear vinyl is thin and, when it wasn’t taken down in spring, it baked in the sun all summer: yellowed and stiff, it splits at the first cold wind or the first attempt to roll it up. Each section is cut from its own measurement and the gazebo stays assembled: in a back-of-lot yard there is no room to take it apart anyway. The screens suffer from something else: proximity. In a narrow yard a panel is as much a partition as a screen: mesh that gets brushed and pushed tears at a corner, goes slack, and the spline works its way out of the groove. The panel comes off, gets rescreened in its frame at the mobile workshop, goes back on. On the low panels that take all the abuse, pet-resistant or aluminum mesh holds up better than the original fibreglass.

Structure and access in Montréal-Nord

Getting into a Montréal-Nord yard means the gap between two buildings or the lane, where there is one, and parking the mobile workshop is negotiated with the street. The panels of a retail gazebo are light and come off at the foot of the structure, but the yard is often too small to work in: they go out one at a time to the vehicle and come back into place. When the panels belong to an upper-floor balcony, they come down the exterior staircase. In an apartment building the occupants need warning: a balcony panel is removed from the balcony, and therefore from inside the unit.

Wind, sun, insects: choosing in Montréal-Nord

The brick of neighbouring façades and the lack of trees in many dense yards make a Montréal-Nord backyard a hot, sunny place, where clear vinyl yellows quickly if it stays up through summer: better to put it up at the first cold and take it down in spring. Wind, cut off by the surrounding buildings, is not what wears a shelter out here: contact is. A heavier mesh on the bottom frames alone settles most of it, and fibreglass stays fine higher up, out of reach. Balcony and backyard evenings are mosquito hour, and a tear in one corner is enough to make the shelter useless.