Window Screen Repair in Montréal

Montréal gets repaired by building, not by window. The brick duplexes and triplexes built between 1900 and 1950 are the dominant stock, and their defining trait is repetition: three stacked units, often the same openings floor to floor, therefore the same screens, installed the same year and worn at the same rate. When one screen lets go in a plex, the others are rarely far behind. The outside staircase, the other signature of Montréal building, changes the logistics rather than the technique: upper units have no shared interior access, and their windows face the street, a balcony or a lane. It is the double-hung window, near-universal in this stock, that makes the whole thing workable — its screen comes out from inside the apartment, with no ladder and no stepping onto a neighbour's balcony.

But Montréal is not only a plex city, and its two other housing stocks call for different repairs. The outlying neighbourhoods have their postwar bungalows, with sliding windows and narrow aluminum screen frames typical of 1950 to 1975 and unavailable in stores today: on those, new mesh in the existing frame costs less and fits better than having a new frame built to the same non-standard size. The downtown condo towers raise a question of format and access instead: the screen there is usually a slider or a balcony patio door, it comes off from inside the unit, and façade appearance is often governed by the condo board. Three housing stocks, three ways of working, in one city.

The double-hung is Montréal's window. Its screen slides between the two sashes and protects only the part that opens, usually the lower half: that is not a half-finished screen, it is the format. On that arrangement aluminum beats wood and vinyl, because it holds its line in a narrow track and can be worked one-handed from inside. In a 1900-1950 brick plex the original frames are often wood or very thin aluminum, sized to the opening rather than to a catalogue — which makes rescreening far more sensible than replacement. Mesh torn at a corner, a spline pushed out of its groove, a frame twisted from years of being forced through a dirty track: all of it is handled inside the apartment, without a ladder.

In bungalows and ground-floor units with a yard door, sliders and patio doors dominate instead. On a slider, the rollers go before the mesh: the screen catches, jumps the track, you force it, and the frame goes out of true. The track gets cleaned, the rollers get replaced, and the frame can often be straightened. The patio door is the most common repair in the trade: mesh slack at hand height, rollers flattened by years of traffic, a track loaded with grit. On a high-rise condo balcony it is the same mechanics, plus constant wind pushing on a large panel — mesh left too slack eventually pulls out of its groove along a whole side. Here too the screen comes off from inside the unit: there is never a need to reach the façade from outside.

In Montréal the constraint is almost never the window — it is getting to it. A second- or third-floor unit with an outside staircase, a backyard reachable only through a lane, a condo entered through a lobby and an elevator, street parking full in the middle of the day: those details decide how long a visit takes. It is also what makes inside removal so important. Double-hungs, casements, sliders and patio doors all come apart from the living side, so the floor number changes nothing. For a plex, an owner does well to count the units across all three apartments before calling, basement included: handling the building in one visit beats climbing that staircase three times a season.

In a plex, ventilation runs through open windows: as soon as the heat arrives the sashes go up and the screen becomes the only filter between the apartment and the street. That is also what wears it out — road dust, pollen, soot, and mesh left open from morning to night six months a year. Sectors near the river, the Rivière des Prairies and the large parks see more mosquitoes in the evening, and a one-centimetre hole cancels out everything else. For a balcony or yard where a cat comes and goes, pet-resistant mesh is the only format that survives a season of claws.