Patio Door Screens in Lachine

Patio doors in Lachine

In the old streets of Lachine, the patio door is an add-on. An early-20th-century brick duplex or triplex had nothing at the back but a kitchen door onto the gallery. The sliding door arrived through renovation, often by widening the opening of the door and the adjoining window in a load-bearing brick wall. The result: doors of unusual width, set at varying sill heights, with a screen panel that matches no catalogue sheet. These doors open onto wooden or metal galleries one or two storeys above the ground, and those galleries are where people look out over the canal in summer. They get heavy use and they are hard to replace — so they get repaired.

The post-war bungalow sectors, further inland, carry patio doors with a different history: some original on the late-1960s houses, most added or replaced in the decades since. Narrow aluminum frames are common there, with rollers whose model has to be identified. Near the waterfront, the recent condos have vinyl doors in standard sizes, often a single model for the whole building. Three doors, three ways of approaching the same failure — and, on the galleries along the canal, a track that takes both the wind off the water and the grit off the gallery floor.

What gives out on these doors in Lachine

On a plex’s renovation door, the first thing to fail is rarely the mesh: it is the track, which was laid on an old wooden sill and has moved with it. The panel rubs at the top or the bottom depending on the season, the rollers flatten trying to compensate, and the mesh slackens at the corner that gets pushed. We set the roller height after replacing them, clean the track and rescreen — the order matters, because new mesh on worn rollers goes slack within a summer. On the bungalows, the roller model question comes before everything else. On condo doors, the plastic hardware cracks and the light frame racks; it is squared before receiving its mesh.

Access and constraints in Lachine

The rear gallery of a triplex is the first challenge: the panel comes out through the apartment, never over the gallery, and has to be laid flat in a kitchen or hallway that is often narrow. On the second or third floor, the outside staircase is only for carrying up the tools. Dimensions are the other point: a door cut into an enlarged opening rarely has a round-number width, and the screen panel is measured to the millimetre rather than to the foot. In the waterfront condos, the interest runs the other way — every door is the same, and it pays to know which model equips the building: one set of rollers found serves all the neighbours.

Which mesh for your patio door in Lachine

A gallery door looking onto the canal takes the wind head-on for much of the summer: standard fibreglass will belly out there before the season ends, and aluminum, being stiffer, is the sensible choice for large exposed panels. Sheltered under a covered gallery or in a bungalow’s yard, standard fibreglass does the job. A cat that goes out on the gallery, or a dog that crosses the bungalow’s door to the yard, calls for pet-resistant mesh; on a panel that has already been patched, it is the only one that avoids a return trip.