Window Screen Repair in Saint-Pie

A 19th-century brick village house is not handled like a bungalow, and Saint-Pie has a good number of them around its church. Those houses, like the wood-frame houses of the same period, have almost all been renovated at least once: the original windows gave way to PVC, to wood-aluminum units, or to rebuilt double-hung sashes. The screens rarely keep up — that is the part people postpone, and it is also the part that eventually cannot be bought any more, because the frames that came with those older windows were made in profiles nobody carries today. Outside the village the built stock spreads out: farms along the concession roads of the Yamaska valley, each with its house, often outbuildings, and a number of openings well beyond what a street house has. A few newer residential streets complete the picture. Three situations, three ways of working.

In the older village houses the screen is almost always a made piece, not a bought one. The openings have shifted with the house, and a perfectly rectangular frame set into an opening that no longer is leaves a gap along one side — exactly where the insects come in. That is why measurements are taken on site, at several heights and several widths, rather than given over the phone. The brick wall adds its own constraint: the opening is deep, and the screen sits in a reveal that leaves little room to manoeuvre a stiff frame. Wood-frame houses of the same period tend to raise the opposite problem — the screen frame is often screwed straight into a jamb that has been repainted many times, and the screw has stopped biting. Re-screening takes care of the mesh; the fastening is a separate job.

The double-hung sash is the historic window of this housing stock, and it is still around, either original or rebuilt to match during a renovation. Its screen does not sit in front of the window: it slides between the two sashes, in the half that opens. So it is narrow, often tall, and permanently working against a sash that moves up and down. On this kind of opening aluminum mesh beats fibreglass: it deforms less, it takes the repeated rubbing of the sash better, and it keeps its shape inside a thin frame that has little material to hold it. A double-hung screen that bellies out in the middle does not necessarily need a new frame — often the mesh was simply redone in fibreglass where aluminum belonged, and the problem comes back every summer.

On a farm the arithmetic changes. There are not three screens to look at, there are twelve or fifteen, spread across the house, a porch or veranda, sometimes an outbuilding — and they share neither age nor size. Some are original, in those narrow 1950s-to-mid-1970s aluminum frames no retailer stocks any more; others are recent PVC additions with parts still available. The right move is to pull everything out before the work starts, including whatever has been sitting in the cellar or the shed for two summers. A mobile business works far better with the full inventory in front of it than with half of it, and patio doors, porch doors and gazebo panels belong in the same visit. Sizes that look alike from ten feet away rarely are once a tape comes out, so every unit gets measured rather than assumed.

Saint-Pie is not a suburb and cannot be worked like one: from the village to the far end of a concession road is several kilometres, and an address does not tell you in advance whether the house is brick near the church or standing alone in the middle of the fields. That is why it pays to describe what you have before the visit — how many units, what kind of windows, whether there is a patio door, a veranda or a gazebo. A mobile business arrives with mesh, framing stock and rollers; what it does not know about in advance is not in the truck. And on a farm, pulling all of the work into a single visit is what separates a job that is finished from a job that is half done.

The Yamaska valley is farm country with a river running through it, and a concession-road house bordered by fields and ditches lives with insect pressure a city street house never sees. Ordinary mosquitoes are stopped by any fibreglass mesh in good condition; no-see-ums and black flies are not — they go straight through standard mesh. Where windows get opened in the evening, near the water or the fields, a tightly woven no-see-um mesh makes a real difference to comfort. And on the south-facing windows of a house with no tall trees, aluminum mesh ages better in the sun than fibreglass.