Patio Door Screens in Carignan

Patio doors in Carignan

The large new neighbourhoods Carignan has built since 2005 share one feature you notice the moment you step into a back yard: the patio door is big. Cottages of that period open the rear of the house onto a deck through a PVC sliding patio door, often wide, sometimes double, and it is by far the most worked opening in the building. The earliest of these subdivisions have aged, and a patio door’s mesh slackens long before the PVC that carries it. It softens first in the middle, where hands push and the dog leans, then lifts out of its groove. The good news is that these doors use common dimensions and hardware still being manufactured: the repair is direct.

Along the rangs, the picture is nothing alike. The rang houses and small farmsteads of the old rural territory were built long before the patio door existed: where there is one, it belongs to an addition, an enclosed summer kitchen or a deck access built later, and therefore to a period and a model that have to be identified on site, panel in hand. Setting matters too: a rang yard is edged with gravel and packed earth, and a service door onto that kind of yard picks up an abrasive dust a subdivision never sees, season after season. One municipality, two worlds, two ways of approaching the same door.

What gives out on these doors in Carignan

On a wide cottage door from 2005 to 2015, the mesh speaks first, and it speaks from the bottom. A wide panel has a lot of span between its stiles: the mesh slackens in the centre, and the lowest band — the one that takes feet, paws and toys — eventually lifts out of its groove. The rubber spline holding it is thicker than a window screen’s; hardened by successive summers, it no longer grips. So the spline is replaced along with the mesh, never one without the other. On a rang door the order reverses: gravel dust attacks the rollers before the mesh, they flatten, the door drags, you force it and the frame bows. Rollers and mesh are done together, the track is cleaned and lubricated, and the frame is straightened when it is only bowed.

Access and constraints in Carignan

Three things complicate the work, and none of them is the mesh. Width first: a recent cottage’s patio door panel is long and floppy when empty, it comes out with two hands and lies flat, or the mesh tensions on the skew and ripples once it is back up. Then the deck: most of these doors open onto a raised wooden floor, with a threshold and sometimes a step, so handling the panel is planned. On a rang, finally, the constraint becomes the property itself: the door is often at the far side of a gravel yard, access runs around a side or through the house, and it pays to note everything that needs doing at that address in one pass.

Which mesh for your patio door in Carignan

Two realities, two answers. On a wide cottage door facing straight out over an open lot, standard fibreglass lacks stiffness: it bellies in the middle and it shows against the light. Aluminum handles that span better and holds its tension. On a narrower rang door, sheltered by a building or a hedge, fibreglass remains a good choice. And in both cases, if a dog noses the door open or a cat hooks its claws in, pet-resistant mesh goes into the same frame and puts an end to the repair that comes back every year.