Patio Door Screens in Outremont

Patio doors in Outremont

In Outremont, the patio door is almost never original. The housing stock here predates the Second World War, when you stepped into the yard through a solid door or a pair of French doors. The sliding screen door you find at the back of these buildings today came with a renovation: an enlarged kitchen, a glazed extension onto the yard, a terrace built on the flat roof of a triplex. So the screen panel is as old as that renovation, not as old as the house — fifteen years in one case, forty in another — and its size was set by whichever contractor installed it, in an opening cut to suit a stone or solid-brick wall far thicker than anything in the suburbs.

That add-on history has a practical consequence. A patio door set into a ground-level extension onto the yard is handled like any other slider: the panel comes out, gets rescreened on the spot, goes back in. One installed on the upper floor of a duplex, or on a rooftop terrace, can only be worked on by going through the flat. And where the rear door is neither white nor a current size, the screen panel that belongs to it is neither: that is one reason the mesh gets redone in the frame already there rather than sourced elsewhere. Rescreening the existing frame settles the question before it comes up — colour, profile and proportions stay put, only the mesh changes.

What gives out on these doors in Outremont

On a door that runs from spring to fall, the rollers give out first. On a patio door from a 1980s or 1990s renovation they are a model that has to be identified before anything is ordered — a close-enough roller has the door jumping the track again within weeks. When the panel has derailed and someone forced it back, the frame bows slightly; it gets straightened on site as long as it is neither twisted nor split. The mesh, for its part, goes slack from being pushed with a full hand and eventually gives at the bottom corner, where a foot or a dog’s paw catches it. Both are done in the same visit: new mesh on worn rollers rubs, binds and goes slack all over again. The track comes last, cleaned and lubricated, because city sand and dust settle in it far more than anyone expects.

Access and constraints in Outremont

The constraint on this stock is the upper floor. A patio door opening onto the rear balcony of a duplex or the roof of a triplex comes apart from inside the flat, the panel lifted outward over the drop: we work from the terrace side, never from a ladder, and someone has to let us in. Dimensions are the other point. An opening cut into a 1920 stone wall received whatever door the contractor had that day, and the screen panel is that size and no other; it does not exist in a store. Finally, when the building is a divided co-ownership, rescreening the existing frame changes nothing about the exterior appearance and therefore concerns no one but the owner of the unit.

Which mesh for your patio door in Outremont

An Outremont patio door most often opens onto a yard hemmed in by the neighbouring buildings: little wind, but heavy use. Standard fibreglass does the job there and lets the evening air through. If a cat or a dog goes through it several times a day, pet-resistant mesh is the only sensible choice — its thick strand stands up to the claw and the pushing paw. On a rooftop terrace it is the reverse: the wind funnels in and works a large mesh all day long, and aluminum, being stiffer, holds its tension where fibreglass balloons and slaps against the frame.