Gazebo Screen & Clear Vinyl in Saint-Jérôme

Gazebos in Saint-Jérôme

In the Bellefeuille and Lafontaine sectors, the bungalows and cottages built after 1960 have backyards deep enough to set a gazebo well away from the house — which is exactly what exposes it: nothing shelters it from the wind, and nothing holds back the snow that leans on its low sides until April. But Saint-Jérôme is already in the Laurentians, and a gazebo feels it. Winter comes earlier and stays longer than by the river, snow piles on the roof and against the sides, and the film stays cold-stiffened for months. Vinyl forced into place in the dead of winter cracks at the corners; film put up in the fall, while still supple, comes through winter far better.

The old heart around the cathedral has no such yards. The workers’ houses and the plexes with outdoor staircases have at best a strip of ground, a deck or a balcony, and the gazebo there takes a more modest form: a small retail model on a wooden deck, or a pergola with panels. When those panels need redoing, they come down the outdoor staircase — the very one that gives the neighbourhood its look. On a workers’ house with a real yard, the gazebo is never original; it is usually a wooden structure added by an owner, with one-of-a-kind panels measured on site and remade one by one.

Screens and vinyl: what gives out in Saint-Jérôme

On the retail gazebos of Bellefeuille and Lafontaine, the film is what fails first, and the Laurentian winter is the reason: yellowed in summer, stiffened by frost, it splits along a fold or a fastener when the wind hits it while still cold. We replace it pane after pane, to the dimension of each original frame. The screen panels age more slowly, but they tear at a corner, go slack or lose their spline; we rescreen them in their frames, with aluminum mesh when the gazebo is exposed to wind. On the pergolas and small gazebos of the old quarter, the panels are often narrow and numerous; they get counted before anything starts, because their number sets the length of the visit, and the structure does not move.

Structure and access in Saint-Jérôme

In a plex with an outdoor staircase, the challenge is logistics: the panels of an upstairs deck come down the stairs one at a time and go back up the same way, which means arranging access and a bit of room at the bottom. In Bellefeuille and Lafontaine the retail gazebo comes apart easily, but a frame that has carried several winters of snow sometimes has a slightly sagged channel, and a panel remade to exact size will not seat until the channel is trued. On a wooden structure added behind a workers’ house, the panels are held under mouldings that are removed with care. We redo panels, never framing.

Wind, sun, insects: choosing in Saint-Jérôme

Two things drive the choice of materials here: the length of the winter and what surrounds the lot. The film has to be in place before the first frosts and go on without forcing; aluminum mesh keeps its tension despite snow leaning against the low sides. Mesh is chosen panel by panel rather than for the whole gazebo: the low sides, the ones in front of you when seated, are where a finer weave earns its place, and they are also the ones that take the snow — two reasons not to fit them with the same mesh as the top. The bottom panels take everything that moves at ground level — pushed snow, branches, claws — and they are the one place on a gazebo where heavier mesh is worth fitting from the start.