Patio Door Screens in Dollard-des-Ormeaux

Patio doors in Dollard-des-Ormeaux

In Dollard-des-Ormeaux the patio door is as old as the house. The bungalows, split-levels and brick cottages delivered between the 1960s and the 1980s were drawn with one: a sliding opening at the back of the dining room or family room, facing the rear yard, closed by a screen panel from the same maker as the glass door. Where that door was never replaced, its screen is a narrow-profile anodized aluminum panel riding on rollers of a model specific to that generation. They have to be identified before they are ordered: two doors that look identical on the same street can carry rollers of different diameter or mounting, and the wrong part cannot be made to fit at installation.

On a split-level the patio door has a feature the bungalow lacks: it often sits on the intermediate level, a few steps below the main floor, and opens onto a patio or deck built later. When the deck came afterward, its boards can sit higher than the original sill, and the bottom of the screen panel scrapes wood every time it slides. Many of these houses have also since replaced the glass door with a newer PVC or aluminum model, and the screen that came with it is in current sizes — simpler to rescreen, but no sturdier: it is still the screen, not the glass door, that absorbs the pushing and the rubbing of daily use.

What gives out on these doors in Dollard-des-Ormeaux

On an original panel from that era the weak point is not only the roller; it is the corners. The narrow profiles are joined by plastic or zinc corner keys, and that is where the frame opens up when someone lifts the door to put it back on its track. A split corner leaves the frame in a parallelogram; the mesh, which was never the problem, starts to pleat and pull out of its groove. The right order is to tighten or replace the corner keys, straighten the frame flat, fit new rollers of the correct model set to the same height on both sides, and only then tension the mesh. The top guide, often forgotten, gets checked too: it is what keeps the panel from tipping out of the track at the slightest lift.

Access and constraints in Dollard-des-Ormeaux

The particular difficulty in Dollard-des-Ormeaux is knowing what you are looking at. After fifty years a patio door may have kept its original glass door and lost its screen, replaced by a hastily cut universal panel from a hardware store, or the reverse. A screen that is not from the same family as the track it rides on will never close properly, rescreened or not. So we look at the track, the clear height and the top guide before deciding whether to rescreen the panel in place or build a frame to the exact dimensions of that opening. The raised patio and the split-level steps are the other constraint: the panel is handled flat, beside the door, never at arm’s length on a staircase.

Which mesh for your patio door in Dollard-des-Ormeaux

The screen panel on a patio door in this stock is larger than the ones on the horizontal sliders of the same house, and it is the only one pushed by hand to walk through. Standard fibreglass suits a door sheltered under a patio roof, with no pets. Where a pet goes through this door, it is the bottom of the panel that fails first: pet-resistant mesh holds up better there than standard fibreglass, with no change of frame. On a wide patio door, aluminum mesh holds its tension where fibreglass eventually bellies in the middle; the yard’s actual exposure is judged on site. The decision is made door by door, not out of habit.