Window Screen Repair in Laval

Few cities in Greater Montreal ask for as many different versions of the same trade as Laval does. Spread across an entire island, it takes you in minutes from an old village core to a street of 1970s bungalows to a townhouse development from the past few years. The old cores of Sainte-Rose and Saint-Vincent-de-Paul carry the most demanding building stock: older houses whose openings have shifted over the decades and are no longer square. On that kind of window a standard-size screen never closes properly — a gap stays open on one side, and that's where everything gets in. The only honest answer is custom fabrication, with measurements taken on site, opening by opening, because two neighbouring windows in the same house don't necessarily share the same dimensions. Nothing about that kind of work can be quoted from a size chart.

The bulk of Laval's housing is elsewhere: in the vast sectors built between 1960 and 1980, in Chomedey, Duvernay and Vimont. Those bungalows and cottages went up in the same period, from the same suppliers, and their screens reach the end of their life at roughly the same time. The narrow aluminum profile of those years is no longer sold anywhere, which sends owners hunting for a replacement part that doesn't exist. The frame, meanwhile, is still there and still square. Finally, the recent townhouse and condo developments bring a third and much simpler profile: casement windows and patio doors in common sizes, parts available, and a repair that is done in the same visit, with no part to order. One address can therefore call for three approaches depending on the neighbourhood, and knowing which of the three a house belongs to is most of the diagnosis.

In newer Laval the casement window dominates. Its screen is interior: it comes off by latches from inside the house, which settles the question of height on a second floor. It is rescreened in its own frame, with no need to take the window apart. It's the fastest repair in the trade, and yet the one most often replaced for nothing: plenty of owners of newer homes assume the screen is a manufacturer's part to be ordered through the builder, when the mesh can be changed in the existing frame like any other. The patio doors on those same houses arrive with the usual set of symptoms: mesh gone slack along the bottom, flattened rollers, a track full of grit. On the casement units themselves standard fibreglass is plenty: set back in the depth of the opening, they never take the constant rubbing a hung window does.

In the 1960s-to-1980s sectors it's mostly sliders and hung sashes. On a slider the screen runs sideways on a track: rollers wear out before the mesh, the screen jams, you force it, and the mesh pays for it. Replacing the hardware at the same time as the mesh keeps you from doing the job again two years later. On a hung window the screen covers only the operating half and works every time the sash moves — that's the case where stiffer aluminum mesh is worth the extra. And in the old village cores, when the original frame is too twisted or too far gone to save, we build a new frame to measurements taken at the house, never to catalogue sizes. Those hung windows are fewer here than in Montreal proper, but they exist on the oldest streets, and they come apart the same way: from inside, with no ladder.

Laval's challenge is first of all a question of distance. The territory is large and the neighbourhoods are far apart; a visit that handles a single screen is expensive in travel for everybody. The right move is to walk the house before calling and count every damaged unit, including the bedroom windows nobody opens and the patio door you've quietly stopped using: they all get handled in the same visit, on site. The second difficulty is the variety of sizes. On a 1970 bungalow it's common for the openings of one house not to share the same dimensions. So each unit gets measured individually rather than inferred from its neighbour — a screen a few millimetres short won't hold in its frame.

Laval is bordered by two rivers, and houses near the water don't experience the same summer as those in the middle of the island. Along the Rivière des Mille Îles and the Rivière des Prairies alike, insect pressure starts early and includes no-see-ums, small enough to pass through standard fibreglass mesh. At those addresses tight-weave mesh earns its place, accepting that it passes slightly less air. Elsewhere in the city standard fibreglass is plenty — unless a cat regularly leans on the screen, in which case pet-resistant mesh saves you from redoing the same unit every spring.