Window Screen Repair in Saint-Laurent

Saint-Laurent is a Montreal borough rather than a city, but that is not the detail that matters for screens. What matters is that one name covers three separate housing stocks with different ages and different windows. Norgate and the post-war streets line up brick bungalows and duplexes whose original screens date from the era of narrow aluminum frames. Around them, the large rental buildings of the 1960s and 1970s repeat the same aluminum slider across dozens of units. And in the Nouveau Saint-Laurent, the recent condo towers are PVC, with manufacturer sizes still in production and parts still available. Across the borough that adds up to three different repairs, and three different lines of reasoning behind one and the same sentence: "my screen is done." The right answer depends entirely on the address and on the year the building went up.

On the post-war streets, the brick bungalows and duplexes have aged alongside their screens: thin aluminum frame, riveted corners, fibreglass mesh gone brittle. That profile is no longer sold at retail, and that is exactly what makes rescreening worthwhile — the frame is straight, it belongs to its opening, only the mesh is dead. In the rental buildings the picture changes completely: screens there are more often missing than damaged, stored in the basement by a previous tenant or never replaced after a break. Because those units were built in series, sizes repeat from apartment to apartment, which simplifies doing a whole building even though every opening still gets measured. In the Nouveau Saint-Laurent towers the stock is recent: sound frames, current manufacturer sizes, parts still available — it is the simplest case of the three. Sizes there are still catalogued, which is rarely the case anywhere else in the borough.

The aluminum slider in the 1960s and 1970s buildings is the defining window of Saint-Laurent. Its screen runs sideways: it covers the fixed half of the frame, rolls on a small track and lifts out from inside the apartment, which answers the height question before it is asked — a panel on the sixth floor comes off exactly as easily as one on the ground floor. On this type of window the rollers almost always wear out before the mesh, and the track fills with city grit until the panel binds. Where the mesh is still sound, there is no reason to redo it; where it is slack or torn, it gets rescreened in the existing frame, which preserves a thin profile retailers stopped carrying a long time ago. Nothing on that window ever has to leave the apartment.

In the post-war bungalows and duplexes, the patio door added at the back — where there is one, which is common on this kind of house — quickly becomes the hardest-working panel: mesh slack along the bottom, flattened rollers, a track full of grit. It gets repaired on site and goes back running straight. In the recent condos of the Nouveau Saint-Laurent the vocabulary changes: PVC frames, current sizes, hardware still in production. There the question is not whether the part exists but whether the frame is worth replacing, and the answer is nearly always no — new mesh tensioned into a sound frame costs a fraction of a complete panel and is done while the owner gets on with something else. On these newer frames the hardware is replaced piece by piece rather than in one lot.

What sets Saint-Laurent apart is the rental stock. In a large rental building the screen does not always belong to the person looking at it: the owner or the property manager usually decides, and a visit is planned differently when it covers several apartments in one day. You need to know how many panels exist, which ones have gone missing, and on which floors. Outright disappearance is part of the picture too: in rental housing a broken screen is rarely replaced, it is simply taken away, which means half the work is building new panels to the real dimensions rather than repairing what is there. In the condo towers the constraint is simpler but firm: everything is done from inside, never from the outside of the building.

Saint-Laurent has no large wooded residential belt, and for most apartments standard fibreglass remains the logical mesh: ordinary mosquitoes, easy replacement, good visibility. What decides between meshes here is exposure and how the home is lived in. In the 1960s and 1970s buildings the sliders are wide and the screen panel is just as wide: several floors up the wind pushes on it constantly, and stiffer aluminum mesh keeps its tension where fibreglass eventually bellies out of its groove. In rental housing, where the same panel serves one tenant after another, ordinary mesh tears at the first set of claws and often just disappears instead of being replaced; pet-resistant mesh outlasts several tenancies.