Patio Door Screens in Granby

Patio doors in Granby

In the working-class streets near downtown Granby, the patio door is a graft. The houses and duplexes of the early 20th century had an ordinary back door and a gallery; when the upper floor was rented out or the kitchen redone, a sliding door often took the place of the old door or of a window, opening onto the rear balcony or a rebuilt gallery. The result is a standard-size door set into a wall that is not square, with shims to make up the difference. The screen panel rolls fine as long as the shims hold; when the wall keeps working a little, the track follows, and the screen door closes on one side but no longer on the other.

The large tracts of bungalows and cottages from the 1960s to the 1980s were built with the original aluminum patio door, as everywhere in Quebec at the time. This is the most predictable stock in the city: one storey, a yard level with the floor, a six-foot door at the back of the kitchen or dining room. The screen is as old as the house, with rollers of a model to identify before ordering. The recent developments come with PVC doors in current sizes, sometimes taller than the doors of earlier years; their screen panel is easy to rescreen, but the factory mesh is not necessarily the right one for a household with children and a dog.

What gives out on these doors in Granby

On a patio door set onto a duplex balcony, the first enemy is water. The track, outdoors and upstairs, catches the rain that bounces off the decking and the snow that packs into it in winter; steel rollers rust, nylon ones seize, and the first push of spring derails the panel. We replace them with stainless-bearing rollers when the model exists, clean out the track and lubricate it dry — not with oil, which holds dust. In the bungalows it is slow wear: yellowed, slack mesh and a narrow frame that has warped from being lifted crooked. It gets straightened flat, its rollers replaced, its mesh retensioned in the same visit. A frame split at the corner does not straighten: we measure it on the opening and build it again.

Access and constraints in Granby

Granby combines two constraints the island suburbs rarely have together. The first is height: a duplex patio door opens onto an upstairs balcony, often a narrow one, and the screen panel does not come out by tilting it over the void. It comes out toward the inside, gets rescreened flat in the room or downstairs, and goes back the same way. The second is ownership: when the tenant reports the problem, the building’s owner decides, and the visit is best agreed between the two before anyone climbs the stairs. The drive out to the Haute-Yamaska adds to that: the visit is prepared in advance, with roller models and dimensions noted, because a part that has to be ordered cannot be improvised on the spot.

Which mesh for your patio door in Granby

For a duplex, the mesh is chosen by who goes through the door. An upstairs balcony door with no pets does fine with standard fibreglass: it is sheltered from the wind by the neighbouring buildings and gets less use than a yard door. In a bungalow where a dog regularly goes through the patio door, pet-resistant mesh stands up to the pressure at the bottom of the panel far better than fibreglass does. On a recent PVC door, wide and little sheltered, aluminum holds the tension fibreglass loses; the exposure is checked door by door.