Window Screen Repair in Pointe-Claire

Pointe-Claire has two ages, and they are not repaired the same way. The old village core, on the shore of Lac Saint-Louis, holds older houses whose openings were cut long before the word standard meant anything in construction. On those houses an opening is almost never truly square: the frame has moved over time, the angles opening on one side and closing on the other. A rectangular screen dropped in there leaves one corner open, and one open corner cancels the whole screen. This is exactly where custom fabrication earns its keep, with measurements taken on site at all four corners rather than just top and bottom. On an older house that is the only method that produces a screen which actually closes, and it is why the age of the building is the first thing worth mentioning. None of that can be estimated honestly over the phone.

The rest of the city is post-war: the broad bungalow and split-level neighbourhoods of Cedar Park, Valois and Lakeside Heights, built as the west end of the island filled in. In many cases these houses still carry their original wooden casements and double-hungs — a detail that changes everything, because a wood or thin-aluminum screen from the 1950s and 1960s no longer exists in any retail size. Here again the frame is often the soundest part of the assembly: straight, solid, simply carrying mesh that has gone brittle. Rescreening in the existing frame is the repair that makes the most sense on this stock. Add to that the patio doors fitted later at the back, almost always in an aluminum frame newer than the house itself — and one that, unlike the rest of the house, repairs with hardware that is still in current production.

The casement is the most common type in the post-war neighbourhoods, and that is good news: its screen is interior, held by clips, and lifts out in seconds without touching the window. Out it comes, rescreened in its own frame, back it goes. The double-hung asks for more care: the screen sits between the two sashes, and on seventy-year-old wood the rabbet has rarely stayed parallel. Mesh pulled too tight bows the frame; mesh left slack leaves a gap along one side. These screens cover only the operating half of the window, which is normal and not unfinished work. When a wood frame does have to go, aluminum holds tension better and does not swell in waterfront humidity — the swelling being what most people mistake for a badly built screen.

The patio door, added at the back of most of these houses, is wear point number one. Three things fail, in this order: the mesh goes slack because the door is pushed with a full hand, the slack mesh rubs the frame, and the rubbing finishes the rollers. Then the door gets stiff, people force it, and the frame bows. Caught before that last stage it is mesh, two rollers and a cleaned track. Caught after, it is straightening or fabrication. On an old-core house where a patio door was cut into an older wall, there is one more thing to check: whether the track is still level. A track that has followed the movement of the house wears new rollers as fast as it wore the old ones, and the problem is back within a season.

The constraint in Pointe-Claire is two housing stocks coexisting in the same city, and sometimes in the same house. A village-core property extended later can carry out-of-square original openings at the front and a standard-format patio door at the back: two methods, two mesh types, two ways of pricing. That is why nothing is seriously assessed without an on-site measurement. The second constraint is quieter: wood. Many original windows have been kept, which is a quality, but a wood frame that has spent seventy years in lakeside humidity can be sound on three sides and spongy on the fourth. We check that before stretching new mesh over it — mesh tensioned on a rail that no longer holds will not last the season.

Lac Saint-Louis borders the city, and you feel it on the screens. Breeze off the open water works the patio-door mesh of exposed properties: mesh that has already gone slack slaps its frame until it tears, while properly tensioned mesh takes the same season without moving. Waterfront humidity, meanwhile, swells wood frames and binds screens that fit perfectly back in May. And near the shore as under the big trees of the post-war neighbourhoods, no-see-ums pass straight through standard fibreglass: a tight weave is the right compromise wherever you want to eat outside.