Patio Door Screens in Hampstead

Patio doors in Hampstead

A Hampstead cottage was not born with a patio door. The brick and stone houses built between 1920 and 1955 opened onto the garden through a kitchen door or hinged French doors; the sliding door arrived with the additions and restorations that most of them have gone through since. So it is found at the back of a remodelled kitchen, in a family room added onto the garden, or in a rear wall opened up all at once. These doors belong to careful renovations: large formats, heights sometimes above common doors, profiles clad in wood or painted aluminum. The screen panel that goes with them is made to their measure — and it is often the piece that successive owners have kept least well.

This door faces the back of an extended house, away from the brick or stone elevation the street looks at, and its track sits level with planted ground. For the patio door, that means a track that collects not just sand but leaves, seeds and tree debris, plus the dampness that stays on the ground under the branches. The hardware works in a wetter environment than on a suburban deck in full sun. And since the door faces the back, invisible from the street, the appearance question that governs the front elevations here does not arise: the panel, the mesh and the rollers can be chosen for what they do, not for what they show.

What gives out on these doors in Hampstead

On a renovation-era patio door, the most awkward failure is not mechanical: it is that the original screen is missing. The door went in twenty or thirty years ago, the house changed hands, and the panel was stored, lost or thrown out because it rolled badly. The door’s manufacturer then has to be identified from its track and top guide to find the matching profile and rollers, or a panel is built to the exact measure of the opening. When the panel is there, the track rules: clogged with garden debris, it makes the rollers skid until they wear flat. We clean it out, replace the rollers, straighten the frame if it was forced and retension the mesh in the same pass.

Access and constraints in Hampstead

The challenge in Hampstead is measuring a door that resembles no other. A patio door set into a wall of stone or solid brick sits in a deep reveal; the screen panel rides at the back of it and has to come out toward the inside, held flat, without jamming against the reveal. The oversize heights of high-end renovations complicate replacement: a store panel cannot be lengthened, it has to be built. Finally, the addition sometimes stands on a crawl space, with a wooden deck that has shifted and a track no longer quite level — which is corrected at the rollers, provided it was measured before anything was tensioned.

Which mesh for your patio door in Hampstead

Under the trees, wind is not the issue: a Hampstead patio door is sheltered by the garden and the neighbouring houses. Standard fibreglass holds its tension there without trouble on a door with no pets. What makes it give way here is the pressure and the claw of a pet pushing at the bottom of the panel to get out to the garden. Pet-resistant mesh settles that for good, in the existing frame. Aluminum is only justified on an especially wide and tall door, where fibreglass would eventually belly in the centre.