Patio Door Screens in Laval

Patio doors in Laval

By the size of its housing stock, Laval is the city of first-generation patio doors. The bungalows and cottages built between 1960 and 1980 in Chomedey, Duvernay and Vimont almost all received a sliding glass door to the backyard at construction — that is when it became the suburban norm. Many are still in place. Their aluminum frame is narrow, their screen panel is light, and their rollers belong to a handful of models that have to be recognized, because the housing, diameter and adjustment method are not interchangeable between manufacturers. In a cottage, the door usually opens onto the back yard and serves as the main way out in summer.

The recent developments of townhouses and condos bring a different door: vinyl, standard sizes, a production screen panel with spring-loaded plastic rollers. On a townhouse, the patio door is frequently upstairs, opening onto a small balcony, or at garden level on a row unit whose yard is only as wide as the building. In the old village cores of Sainte-Rose and Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, the patio door, where there is one, comes from an extension or a renovation: it sits in an old wall, with a sill and a height that resemble nothing found in Vimont. You do not guess the door at a Laval address; you look at it.

What gives out on these doors in Laval

An original 1970s door tells its story by sound: the scrape on start-up comes from flattened rollers that no longer turn, the sharp knock at the end of travel from a racked frame hitting the jamb before the latch engages. In between, the mesh has followed the frame and gone slack on the side away from the handle. We never treat just one of these symptoms: rollers identified and replaced, track cleared of deck grit and lubricated, frame squared, mesh redone — all in the same visit, because a new roller under a frame that is still racked simply takes up the same wear again. The frame is only replaced if it is cracked at a corner or twisted beyond straightening. On recent vinyl doors, the roller spring and the plastic handle give out before anything else.

Access and constraints in Laval

The first Laval challenge is the variety of models within a single sector: three neighbouring Chomedey bungalows can carry doors from three 1970s manufacturers, and the roller from one will not fit the next. The panel has to be seen before a part is ordered. The second is the upstairs townhouse door: the balcony is small, nobody rescreens out there, and the panel comes down the interior stairs to be worked on flat. In condos, the look of the balcony is the board’s business; rescreening in the existing frame, without changing the frame colour or the mesh colour, touches nothing visible from the street.

Which mesh for your patio door in Laval

On a Duvernay or Vimont cottage door where a dog or cat pushes the panel open itself, the bottom of the mesh is what gives first: pet-resistant mesh, thicker and held tighter in its groove, is made for that pressure point. On a second-floor townhouse balcony open to the wind, aluminum mesh keeps its tension on a tall panel. For a sheltered door with no pets, standard fibreglass remains the economical and most transparent choice.