Window Screen Repair in Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac

Sainte-Marthe-sur-le-Lac was not built all at once like a planned suburb: it grew out of former cottages on Lac des Deux Montagnes, converted and then enlarged over the decades. That piece of history has very concrete consequences for window screens. A house that started as a cottage, became a bungalow or a single-storey home in the 1970s or 1980s, then had an addition put on twenty years later does not have windows from one era — it has two or three. Owners usually discover this the day they try to buy replacement screens and find that nothing repeats from one room to the next. In this Deux-Montagnes MRC town, the first job is therefore taking inventory, before any repair begins.

The renovations carried out since the 2019 flood sharpened that mix. A renovated house may well have some of its windows redone and others left as they were — and the screens follow the same split. On the new work everything is standard: common sizes, available hardware, a single unit finished during the visit with no special order. On what was left untouched you find the narrow aluminum frames of the original screens, in dimensions nobody sells any more. That is where rescreening earns its keep: the frame is straight, it is fitted to its opening, and only the mesh has failed. Putting fresh mesh into it costs far less than having a new frame built to the same dimensions — and gives a fit that a store-bought frame would not have delivered anyway.

On the bungalows and single-storey homes of the 1970s through the 1990s, sliding windows dominate and the screen runs sideways on a track. The wear pattern is almost always the same: rollers flatten, the screen starts to bind, you push harder, and pushing is what eventually tears or stretches the mesh. Caught before that stage, the repair is hardware and a cleaned track, nothing more. These houses also nearly all have a patio door, and it is the hardest-working part of the house: opened and shut constantly all summer, rolling in a track that collects sand and grit. Stretched mesh, worn rollers, a track that needs clearing — it is the most common repair in the trade, and in most cases it is settled on site with no order and no second visit.

The added-on sections change things. An extension built later often carries casement windows, whose screen sits on the inside: it releases from its latches, gets rescreened in its own frame and goes back without the window being touched. On a single house it is therefore not unusual to deal with three different mechanisms in one visit — slider, casement, patio door — each with its own hardware, which is why everything gets measured before anything is started. On lots facing the lake there are also gazebos and deck shelters to consider: their panels are rescreened like anything else, and clear MICA vinyl closes the shelter in once the evenings turn cool.

The challenge specific to this town is identification. On a house that has been enlarged once or twice, two screens that look alike can differ by half an inch and not be interchangeable — and nothing tells you that until you try to put them back. So frames get numbered as they come out, opening by opening, before anything is rescreened. That is the step homeowners skip when they take their own screens down in the fall, and it explains the ones that "don't fit any more" come spring: they fit, just not in that window. The second point is mesh selection. On a house where five units from different eras are being repaired, it is better to put the same mesh everywhere, otherwise the difference in shade and weave shows from the street.

Lac des Deux Montagnes weighs heavily on the mesh decision. On the waterfront, insect pressure is not what it is a few kilometres inland: no-see-ums and black flies pass straight through standard fibreglass, whose weave is too open to stop them. Tight-weave no-see-um mesh does stop them — it lets through slightly less air and slightly less light, and that is the trade-off to accept knowingly. On a heavily used patio door or a gazebo exposed to wind off the lake, aluminum is stiffer and holds its tension better. The repair season runs from April through October.