Daily Home Renovation Tips

In Part 5 we reviewed the Daily Home Renovation Tips solution to have a smooth lower tract installation, especially for those using a walker or wheel chair.

Today we review the installation of the upper tract and the left and right screen housing components.

Now, the actual order of installation is to install each screen housing component and then the upper track. To see the manufacturer recommended installation instructions for those who order the retractable screen directly from DreamScreens Canada Inc., please see this area of their web page containing detailed measuring and installation instructions  for single doors, double (French) doors and motorized screen doors. You will find very nice download-able installation instructions from this link.

Below are several different photo’s of Dean, the wonderful installer (did you know he even cleaned up afterwards, including wiping down the retractable screen tracts, housing components, etc.?), installing the different aspects for the upper track and screen housing components.

The component housing the retracted screen is affixed to the vertical part of the door frame with long screws, one at each end.

Notice that the vertical components housing the retracted screens contain a grey coloured  covering at the top of the upper track guide. This is for protection during shipment and installation.

Next the upper track was connected to both of the vertical retracted screen housing units.

As part of this, per the above picture, Dean loosened the long screws at the top and bottom areas of the vertical retracted screen housing components to ease the process of guiding the upper track onto these housing components, followed by re-inserting the long screws into place.

Once this was done, we stood back and admired the installation. However, as the picture below indicates, we were not finished.

Do you see the gaps between the retracted screen unit and the vertical part of the door frame? How about the gap between the upper track and the upper horizontal part of the door frame? Here’s a close up of the right retracted screen housing component.

Now the fix for these gaps may seem apparent; however, the reason for these gaps and all of the different fixes might surprise you. Return tomorrow when we discuss what Dean did to fill in the gaps.

To continue with the next article in this series on retractable screen doors, simply select this link to Part 7.