Patio Door Screens in Sainte-Thérèse

Patio doors in Sainte-Thérèse

In Sainte-Thérèse the patio door does not appear in the same place from one neighbourhood to the next. In the old core around rue Blainville, the older houses had none: where there is one, it came with an addition, an enlarged kitchen or an enclosed back porch, and it is the age of that work rather than the age of the house. In the post-war streets it was often cut into the back wall of a bungalow, in the era of narrow aluminum frames. Near the train station it is standard issue: every condo or recent apartment unit opens onto its balcony through a sliding door, and the panels repeat from one floor to the next. Three neighbourhoods, three ways of arriving at the same door.

The strong presence of rental housing then changes the reasoning. In a duplex or a small building, the back balcony's patio door is the most heavily used moving part of the unit, and it passes from one household to the next without ever being serviced: nobody overhauls the rollers between leases. Because the balconies stack, the upstairs door is usually the exact twin of the one below — same model, same track, same panel width — and the two reach the end of their life together. What is solved on one is solved the same way on the other, provided the doors have been counted and entry arranged before the trip.

What gives out on these doors in Sainte-Thérèse

On these doors, winter leaves its mark. The grit spread on sidewalks and parking areas comes up to the balcony on the soles of shoes, works down into the track, and waits for spring; from the first passes of the warm season the rollers grind it every time and eventually flatten. The panel drops, drags, gets forced, and the frame eventually twists — and it is that twist that makes the mesh impossible to tension evenly, long before it actually tears. The sequence of work is always the same: track emptied, brushed and lubricated, new rollers matched to the extrusion, frame straightened, mesh replaced and re-tensioned, latch realigned. The panel is replaced only if it is split or bent past the point of staying in its track.

Access and constraints in Sainte-Thérèse

Three things get arranged before a panel comes off its track. The occupant has to be there and forewarned, since the panel is removed from inside and the room opening onto the balcony has to be crossed; a whole building is therefore done in one pass only when every door is on the schedule. Then there has to be room to lay the panel flat, which a narrow back balcony does not always offer: in that case we carry it down and work at ground level. And in the old core, where houses nearly meet the sidewalk, the back yard is what serves as working space.

Which mesh for your patio door in Sainte-Thérèse

The choice is made door by door. A balcony door in a unit that changes hands takes a lot of handling and little care: aluminum mesh is stiffer, stands up better to that regime, and holds its tension on a wide panel. On an exposed balcony several storeys up it has the same advantage against the wind, where fibreglass starts to balloon. Wherever a cat in the unit pushes the door open for air, only pet-resistant mesh saves redoing the bottom of the panel over and over. A sheltered yard door with no animal is still well served by standard fibreglass.