Patio Door Screens in L'Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève

Patio doors in L'Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève

L’Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève is a borough of Montréal that does not behave like the city: along the riverside roads, houses follow one another at a distance, on large lots, and the patio door looks out on the river, a woodlot or a field rather than a fence. In the old village and farm houses, that door is never original; it belongs to an extension — an enlarged kitchen, a room added on the water side — and its frame sits in a wall a century older than it is. The screen panel then rolls on a track that follows the movements of the old house: more or less straight one year, slightly sloped the next. It is not adjusted once and for all; it is adjusted to the building’s current state.

Around these old houses, two more recent generations carry most of the sector’s patio doors. The bungalows of the 1970s and 1980s have their original narrow-frame aluminum door, often turned toward the yard and the river; the recent builds on large lots have PVC doors in current formats but in generous widths, because the view deserves it. Many of these doors open not onto grass but onto a screened veranda or a covered deck; the sliding screen becomes the second curtain between the room and the outdoors. That is a blessing for the hardware, which ages under cover, and a trap for the mesh, thought useless until the evening the veranda is left open.

What gives out on these doors in L'Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève

On a door facing the river, fibreglass mesh never rests: the wind balloons it inward, releases it, balloons it again, and after a few seasons it has gone slack, its spline has come unseated on one side and the bottom gapes. On those doors we tension a stiffer mesh rather than refit the same one. The hardware suffers differently: on a large lot the track fills with soil and plant debris as much as with sand, a mix that holds moisture and jams the rollers rather than wearing them. We clean out, replace rollers with a flat spot, straighten a bungalow’s narrow frame if it was forced during a derailment, and redo the mesh in the same pass — otherwise the twist is back the following summer.

Access and constraints in L'Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève

The sector’s constraint is width and isolation. A patio door on a recent large-lot house can carry eight feet of screen panel; it comes out, gets rescreened flat and goes back on site, but it needs a flat, sheltered surface to do it — a deck or a garage, not a sloping lawn. The doors of the old houses raise the opposite question: small, off-format, set into an extension whose floor is no longer level with the house. And since the patio door, the veranda and the covered deck of one house often involve three different sets of hardware, the survey is done in one pass rather than opening by opening.

Which mesh for your patio door in L'Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève

Here the mesh for a patio door is chosen by width and exposure. On the wide doors of recent houses that face the water or a field, with no hedge to break the wind, aluminum is the only mesh that keeps a flat surface from jamb to jamb. On a bungalow’s narrower door sheltered by a covered deck, standard fibreglass does the job. In a house where the dog comes and goes through this door to the grounds, pet-resistant mesh is what holds up best at the bottom of the panel. Fine weave against the river’s small insects is discussed on site, according to exposure.