Gazebo Screen & Clear Vinyl in Sainte-Thérèse

Gazebos in Sainte-Thérèse

In Sainte-Thérèse the gazebo changes character from one neighbourhood to the next. Around rue Blainville, the old houses of the village core have no original gazebo — where one exists, it is a wooden structure added behind the house, often on a lot with more shade than the newer neighbourhoods get, with custom-made screen panels in wooden frames and clear vinyl (MICA film) laid over them in the fall. In the post-war neighbourhoods, the bungalow’s backyard holds the classic retail gazebo: aluminum or steel frame, standard-size panels, original vinyl often at the end of its life. Two very different objects, a few streets apart, calling for two ways of measuring and working.

Near the train station, the high share of rental housing, duplexes and condos changes the picture again. The gazebo there is smaller, or gives way to a terrace pergola; sometimes it sits on a balcony, sometimes on a roof terrace, and it belongs to a tenant or a co-owner rather than to the owner of the land. Its standard-size panels are exposed to wind aloft and travel by stairwell when they need rebuilding. From the wooden gazebo of a shaded village lot to the little terrace gazebo of a condo by the station, the panel is rebuilt neither the same way nor from the same measurements.

Screens and vinyl: what gives out in Sainte-Thérèse

On the wooden structure behind a house in the old core, shade keeps the damp in: the frame dries badly, the fasteners give out before the mesh, and the panel ends up hanging in its opening. We rescreen each panel in its original frame with new fasteners and cut the clear vinyl to the real shape of each opening — no two alike on a hand-built structure. On the retail gazebos behind the bungalows the order is reversed: the vinyl goes first, yellowed and stiff, then split by a gust; the screening follows, slack or torn low down where people pass. The vinyl is replaced pane by pane in the original frame, and the panels are rescreened in their frames. The structure, in both cases, is left alone.

Structure and access in Sainte-Thérèse

In the old core the house is close to the street and the lot is reached through a narrow passage or through the house: the panels of a wooden structure unscrew one at a time and are rebuilt in the mobile workshop, parked wherever the street allows. In the post-war neighbourhoods the bungalow’s yard is reached along the side and the retail gazebo comes apart by panel. Near the station the constraint is twofold: access to the terrace or balcony runs through the unit or a shared stairwell, and the gazebo sometimes falls under condo bylaws or the lease. Better to know before the visit who decides and which way the panels travel. The structure itself stays as it is.

Wind, sun, insects: choosing in Sainte-Thérèse

Lots in the old core are generally shadier than those in the post-war neighbourhoods, and that changes the failure: in shade, vinyl yellows more slowly, but the damp that lingers under trees works the wooden frames and slackens the mesh; in the sun of a bungalow yard, it is the vinyl that stiffens and splits and the fibreglass that turns brittle. Near the station, high terraces catch the wind, and aluminum mesh holds its tension there better than fibreglass. Insects stay ordinary in town, except on a lot backing onto a woodlot, where a tight weave is worth discussing. In the shade of the old core the vinyl is mostly there to cut the wind; in an open bungalow yard it is there first of all to stretch the season.