Patio Door Screens in Saint-Laurent

Patio doors in Saint-Laurent

A patio door screen has nothing in common with a window screen. It is pushed open and pulled shut several times a day from May to September, at adult shoulder height and child hand height, and it is the one the dog or the cat goes through. In Saint-Laurent you find it first behind the post-war bungalows and duplexes of the Norgate area, where the sliding door is rarely original: on that kind of house it usually arrived with an addition, a patio, or a rebuilt back wall. Depending on the year of that work, the screen panel is either a narrow aluminum frame from the 1965-1985 generation or a more recent PVC panel. Both are repairable, but not with the same hardware, and that is the first thing we look at when we reach the door.

The large rental buildings of the 1960s and 1970s frame the question differently. When a unit opens onto a balcony through a sliding door, that panel is the only screen the household handles every day, and it ages at the speed of use rather than the speed of the calendar. In the condo towers of Nouveau Saint-Laurent the balcony door is PVC and recent: its rollers and catches are still sold separately, so a panel can be made to run properly again without anything else being touched. So the gap between the borough's two extremes is less about age than about available parts — on a 1970s extrusion the roller is chosen from the track, on a recent panel it is chosen from its model. In both cases the panel comes out and goes back in from inside the unit.

What gives out on these doors in Saint-Laurent

The order of failure rarely changes. The rollers wear down and clog with winter grit and gravel, the panel jumps its track, someone forces it shut, and the frame eventually racks out of square. The mesh follows: stretched at the height where the hand pushes, torn open at a corner, split by a claw. The track fills up and the door starts to drag. Rescreening a panel that rides on finished rollers simply means doing the same panel over long before its time, so we change rollers and mesh in the same visit, clean and lubricate the track, and straighten the frame if it has twisted. A full panel is replaced only when it is cracked or bent — on a narrow 1970s aluminum extrusion, the frame is worth more than the mesh it carries, because it cannot be bought again.

Access and constraints in Saint-Laurent

Access is the borough's real constraint. In a rental building the patio door opens onto a balcony several storeys up: nothing is done from outside, the panel is lifted off its track from inside the unit, rescreened flat, and set back in place. What is needed is entry to the unit and the agreement of whoever decides — owner, manager, or occupant — settled before the visit rather than on the doorstep. In a condominium, exterior appearance often falls under the syndicate, but new mesh stretched into the original frame changes nothing visible from the street. Then there are the dimensions: a door installed with a 1970s addition matches no catalogue size and is measured at the opening.

Which mesh for your patio door in Saint-Laurent

On a patio door, the mesh is chosen according to what pushes against it. If a cat or a dog forces it open to reach the balcony or the yard, pet-resistant mesh is the only choice that holds: ordinary mesh gives way at the first claw and the panel comes back every spring. On a wide, exposed door — high up in a building, or open behind a bungalow — aluminum mesh keeps its tension where fibreglass balloons and eventually pulls out of its groove. For a sheltered door with no animal in the house, standard fibreglass does the job very well.