Window Screen Repair in Longueuil

Longueuil sits next door to Brossard, where this company is based, and it also has one of the most uniform housing stocks in Greater Montreal. Vieux-Longueuil and Saint-Hubert were built largely between 1950 and 1975: post-war bungalows, semi-detached houses and duplexes, put up quickly, in the same sizes, with the same hardware. Seventy years later, two things follow. First, nearly every one of those houses has a sliding patio door, often the original or its direct replacement. Second, the window stock has largely been renewed: many owners have replaced their original sashes with PVC, in waves, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. One house therefore frequently carries two generations of screens — the ones that came with the new windows, and the older ones in the basement or the garage that were never changed. Knowing which generation a screen belongs to changes what the repair costs.

That double generation explains a good share of the calls in a sector like this one. The screens supplied with PVC windows are stock parts: thin frame, light fibreglass mesh, plastic hardware. They last about a decade, then the mesh goes slack and the clips break. The owner goes back to the original installer and often discovers the company no longer exists, or no longer carries that model. Two roads remain: have a complete frame built, or put new mesh and new hardware in the frame you already have. The second is almost always the right one, because nothing is broken about the PVC or aluminum frame — it has simply lost its mesh. The same is true of the original 1960s units, whose narrow profiles aren't sold anywhere anymore. The frame outlives the mesh by a wide margin, and that gap is where the repair lives.

In Longueuil the patio door is the most requested repair — and that follows: every post-war bungalow has one, it opens onto the yard, and it gets used every day from May to September. Three things fail, almost always in the same order. First the rollers, which flatten out and make the panel drag; then the track, which fills with sand and grit and destroys new rollers if it isn't cleaned; and finally the mesh, which goes slack along the bottom because people shove the panel by hand instead of pulling it by the handle. All three are handled in the same visit, at your door, without taking the panel to a shop: we rescreen on site and replace the hardware in the existing frame. Cleaning the track is not cosmetic: skipping it is what shortens the life of a new set of rollers.

On the replacement PVC windows the screen is usually a side-running slider or an interior casement screen. Either way, the sizes are common and parts are available: the repair needs neither fabrication nor special parts. Where attention goes is the frame itself. A thin PVC screen frame bows when the mesh was pulled too tight at assembly; we straighten it before rescreening, otherwise the new mesh will take on the same distortion within one summer. On duplexes it pays to measure both units at once: the openings are often identical from one floor to the other, and the same units will come due anyway. And if the frame is cracked rather than bowed, it gets replaced on its own — the window itself is never touched. That distinction matters, because replacing a window over a torn screen is an expensive mistake in this sector.

Longueuil's particular constraint comes from the age of the stock and the disappearance of the original suppliers. Windows replaced in the 1990s and 2000s were installed by companies many of which are no longer in business, and their screens were stock parts specific to each manufacturer. Hunting for the exact part is a dead end; new mesh and new hardware in the existing frame is the way out. The other point concerns the duplexes, which are numerous in Vieux-Longueuil: when an owner lives in one unit and rents the other, access to both has to be planned, because a tenant's screen comes off from inside and someone has to be there. Counting and measuring every unit before calling avoids a second visit.

Longueuil stretches along the river, and the humidity that comes with it lengthens mosquito season in the riverside sectors. At those addresses spring no-see-ums pass straight through standard fibreglass, whose mesh openings are larger than they are; tight-weave mesh is the only thing that stops them, at the cost of a little ventilation. Elsewhere in the city standard fibreglass does the job. The real local factor remains the patio door: mesh you walk through several times a day all summer wears out far faster than a window screen, and that's the one worth considering a tougher mesh for, especially with a dog or a cat in the house.