Patio Door Screens in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

Patio doors in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

A brick duplex or triplex in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, built between 1910 and 1950, had no patio door. It had a solid back door, a wooden gallery and a staircase down to the yard or the lane. The sliding screen door you find there today arrived with a renovation — a kitchen opened onto the yard on the ground floor, a bedroom enlarged on the second, or a terrace built on the flat roof. So the screen panel is as old as the renovation and the size the contractor chose that day, nearly always PVC in a current dimension, and it lives on a floor the original door never knew. A patio door on the third floor, opening onto a roof, is a plex situation, not a suburban one.

This door has a particularity suburban doors lack: it often opens onto very little space. A rear plex balcony is the width of a table; a rooftop terrace is bounded by a railing on three sides. When the screen panel comes out of its track it has to find room to be laid down, rescreened and refitted without being twisted against a rail. That is the first thing we look at on arrival. The second is use: in a flat where the patio door replaced the back door, it is the way outside, opened and closed from morning to night, shoved with an elbow and both arms full. A plex patio door screen works harder than a bungalow screen, and it does so over a drop.

What gives out on these doors in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

On these PVC doors fitted during renovations, the roller is a common model and it is the track that suffers instead: brick dust and street dust settle in it, soil from planters and grit from the terrace pile on, and the roller ends up riding on a paste that locks it. The panel starts to drag, someone forces it, the corner of the frame opens. On a rooftop terrace the wind joins in: it shoves the panel in its track, makes it vibrate and stretches the mesh long before hands get to it. We take the panel out, change the rollers rather than clean them, redo the mesh in the frame, close the opened corner and straighten the stile if it has bowed. The track is washed and lubricated last, once the panel is out.

Access and constraints in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

Access is the challenge, but not the front-façade kind: here everything happens at the back and up high. A patio door on the second or third floor opens onto a narrow balcony or a terrace, and the panel is worked on right there, never carried down the exterior spiral staircase; the occupant has to open up at the agreed time. Then comes co-ownership: when a plex has been divided, the rooftop terrace and the rear balcony are sometimes common portions for exclusive use, and the exterior appearance is the syndicate’s business. Rescreening the existing frame changes none of that: same profile, same colour. Finally, a door set into a 1925 brick wall is the size of the opening that could be cut between two lintels, not the catalogue size.

Which mesh for your patio door in Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie

At street level, a plex yard door is sheltered by the neighbouring buildings: standard fibreglass is enough and breathes well in a hemmed-in yard where the air barely moves. On the third floor, on a rooftop terrace, nothing stops the wind: aluminum keeps the mesh flat across a large panel that fibreglass lets balloon and slap. And if a cat uses that door, it is the bottom of the panel that takes everything: pet-resistant mesh holds there because its strand is thicker, though it also lets a little less air through — on a plex door, that is the one trade-off to settle.