Patio Door Screens in Repentigny

Patio doors in Repentigny

In Repentigny, the age of the patio door is almost never the age of the house. The suburb was built from the 1960s through the 1990s, at a time when the back deck and its sliding door were often added afterwards, and when the doors installed were aluminium. Fifty years on, a good share of those openings has been redone at least once as renovations came along, so a single street now carries original aluminium doors, replacement doors from the 1990s and recent PVC ones. The 2002 amalgamation with Le Gardeur sharpened the mix further by bringing together neighbourhoods built in different eras.

Two local details shape how a visit goes. The first is the split-level, very common in the suburb of that period: its patio door opens onto the rear half-level, and therefore onto a deck reached by a few steps, so the screen panel either goes down those steps or is worked on the deck itself. The second is the river: on the streets that follow it, the back deck takes the wind with no building to break it, and a large door panel absorbs that wind every time it is left part way open. The sectors opened since 2000 escape both: PVC door in a common size, deck at grade, series panel.

What gives out on these doors in Repentigny

The most common failure on a door of that age cannot be repaired, because there is nothing left to repair: the screen panel was taken off and stored in the garage years ago, then forgotten. People then call to have the door replaced, when the panel can be rebuilt to the dimensions of the existing opening without touching the glass door or its frame. Next comes a fault peculiar to the aluminium doors of the older suburb: their screen panel hangs from a TOP track and is merely guided at the bottom, the reverse of recent doors, which carry it on rollers at the foot of the frame. When that top track has sagged slightly under the weight, or its wheels have seized, the panel jumps out of its run as soon as it is pushed briskly. The instinct is to force it, and the corner of the light frame is what gives. The track is brought back into line, the wheels are replaced, the frame is squared and the panel is rescreened; on newer PVC doors, the question moves to the bottom of the panel, where spring rollers lose their push and let the panel drag on the rail.

Access and constraints in Repentigny

The difficulty lies in what has gone missing. When the screen panel no longer exists, there is nothing to measure: dimensions are then taken from the opening and from the door's own tracks, which happens on site and not over the phone. Second point, the split-level: its back deck is the only work surface available, and it carries the season's furniture and barbecue — clearing it in advance saves most of the visit. Finally, the aluminium doors of the older suburb come from manufacturers who no longer exist, and their hardware cannot be ordered from a catalogue: it is identified on site, from the part once removed, then replaced with a compatible equivalent.

Which mesh for your patio door in Repentigny

On the streets that follow the river, wind settles the question: a large door panel exposed with nothing in the way holds its tension better in aluminium mesh, where fibreglass eventually bellies at the centre and flaps in its frame. Farther from the shore, in neighbourhoods where the trees planted at construction now stand mature and break the wind, standard fibreglass does the job on a door panel, provided it is set with a spline of the right size — over a large area, tension is what holds, not the material. And if a dog goes through the door several times a day, pet-resistant mesh settles in advance what claws would do to the bottom of the panel. On a split-level with a raised deck, that bottom is precisely the part that suffers least.