Patio Door Screens in Longueuil

Patio doors in Longueuil

In Vieux-Longueuil and Saint-Hubert, a street of bungalows and semi-detached houses built between 1950 and 1975 most often lines up two generations of patio doors side by side. The first belongs to the houses of the mid-1960s and early 1970s, when the sliding door became common: narrow aluminum frame, single glazing, a thin screen panel on two rollers of a model to be identified. The second is the vinyl door that replaced it, usually the day the house’s windows went to vinyl — the two changes go together. Those replacement doors are twenty or thirty years old now, and their light production screen panel is reaching the end of its own road.

The semi-detached and the duplex give the patio door a particular place. In a semi, the yard is half the width of an ordinary lot and the patio door sits close to the party wall; the patio is small, and the door is the only wide opening on the back façade. In a duplex, the upper unit sometimes has a patio door onto a rear balcony, added when the balcony was rebuilt, while the lower unit steps straight out onto the yard. The two units then share neither door model nor door age. A street that looks uniform still requires that each panel be looked at for what it is.

What gives out on these doors in Longueuil

The original aluminum door and the vinyl replacement do not break the same way. On 1960–1975 aluminum, the roller is steel or nylon on an axle that rusts and seizes; the panel drags, the thin frame racks into a parallelogram and the mesh, set in a narrow groove, escapes along one side. On 1990s–2000s vinyl, the roller is a spring-loaded plastic wheel: the spring tires, the wheel cracks, the panel tips and drops out of its top guide. In both cases we replace the pair of rollers, scrape out and lubricate the track, straighten the frame and rescreen — all at the house. A new roller on a dirty track wears out in months; that is why the steps are never separated.

Access and constraints in Longueuil

In a semi, the panel comes out from inside as everywhere, but the rear patio leaves little room to step back, and the party wall means you cannot go around the house on one side: the yard is reached through the house or by the single side passage. In a duplex, the upstairs door requires the tenant to be present, and the panel comes down the stairs. Dimensions are mostly an issue on the original aluminum doors, lower than today’s doors; a new panel will not fit them, so the original is kept and rescreened. In a duplex the two doors share neither age nor hardware: the upstairs panel is looked at before the downstairs one, so that a part ordered can serve both where it fits.

Which mesh for your patio door in Longueuil

On a Saint-Hubert bungalow whose patio door opens onto the yard, a dog that lets itself in and out wears the bottom of the panel before anything else: pet-resistant mesh is the only one that holds up to that back-and-forth. On a standard-width vinyl door sheltered by a balcony or an awning, standard fibreglass is enough and lets through the most air. On an original aluminum door, the groove is narrow and the spline has to be chosen accordingly; mesh that is too thick will not go in, while properly set aluminum mesh holds there for a very long time.