Patio Door Screens in Montréal

Patio doors in Montréal

In a brick duplex or triplex from 1900 to 1950, the patio door is a graft. The building never had one: its rear exits were solid doors onto the balcony and the outside staircase. The sliding glass door arrived through renovations — a kitchen opened onto the back balcony, a rear living room enlarged, or an upper unit that gave itself a rooftop terrace with a door to reach it. Each case sets its own dimension, since the opening was cut into brick that was never meant for it. The screen panel on these doors is therefore unique to the address, and the rooftop-terrace door is the most exposed in the whole building: sun, wind, rain and snow head-on, with no balcony overhead for shade.

Montreal’s two other housing stocks bring very different doors. The post-war bungalows of the outer neighbourhoods often still have their original 1965–1985 patio door, the builder’s: narrow aluminum frame, slender panel, rollers of a pattern particular to the manufacturer that must be recognized before being replaced. The condo towers downtown have more recent balcony doors in common sizes, where the problem is not the part but the height: a screen panel on the twentieth floor lives in a wind the ground never feels. Three doors that share only their principle — a panel rolling on a track — and all of them repaired on site, from inside the unit.

What gives out on these doors in Montréal

The patio door is the most handled screen in a home, and it fails in a known order. The rollers flatten or clog with grit, the panel drops onto the track, scrapes, comes out of its channel; someone forces it and the frame bows. The mesh follows: stretched in the middle by pushing hands, torn at the bottom corner by a foot or a claw. On a rooftop-terrace or tower-balcony door, wind speeds all of it up — a panel that slams in its track with every gust wears out its rollers in a few seasons. Everything is set right in the same visit, and exposure dictates the order: on a rooftop-terrace or high-balcony door the track — which the wind refills — is cleared first, before new rollers of the correct pattern go in and the mesh is retensioned. The frame is replaced only if bent or cracked.

Access and constraints in Montréal

A patio-door panel comes free toward the room, which makes the floor number secondary; what is left to settle is the route — who opens, and where the panel travels if it has to leave. In a plex, the upstairs tenant has to be home; in a tower, the panel goes through the lobby and the elevator if it must leave, so the work is done on the balcony or in the living room instead. On a narrow balcony high up, a panel is never balanced on the railing: it lies flat on the floor or comes inside. In a condominium the look of the façades falls to the syndicate, but a panel rebuilt in its original frame goes back exactly where it was and changes nothing outside — that is the simple route.

Which mesh for your patio door in Montréal

Wind decides a lot in Montreal. On a plex rooftop terrace or a tower balcony, aluminum mesh keeps its tension where fibreglass bellies and eventually slips out of its channel; it is the choice to favour as soon as a door is exposed at height. On the ground floor of a plex or in a bungalow, standard fibreglass is enough — unless a cat goes out through that door or a dog waits behind it to be let out: pet-resistant mesh takes the claws that fibreglass will not survive for a season.