The screen in the office window had a hole in the lower corner exactly the size and shape of Moose's nose. He spent all of last summer pressing his face against it to supervise the sidewalk, and by fall it was less a screen than a suggestion. Five other screens around the house weren't much better: two had gone brittle and split along the frame, and three had small tears from who knows what. Mosquitoes in our part of Michigan get serious around Memorial Day, so I gave myself two evenings and a Saturday to re-screen all six.
What it took
Our windows are 1998 vinyl replacements, and the screens are plain aluminum frames held in with little spring tabs, so getting them out took about a minute each. Everything else came from Menards:
- A roll of charcoal fiberglass mesh, enough for all six with plenty left over
- Two packs of rubber spline, because I bought the wrong diameter first
- A spline roller with a convex wheel on one end and a concave wheel on the other
- Fresh utility knife blades
Total: $58. Tessa picked charcoal over gray because she says you see through it better from inside. She was right, and the view out the front window is noticeably clearer than it was with the old gray mesh.
About that spline: the old stuff I pulled out looked thin, so I bought thin. It was too thin and rolled in loose enough that the mesh slid when I tugged it. The right way is to take a short piece of the old spline to the store, or better, measure the channel. I did neither, which is how I ended up with a spare pack of spline I'll probably never use.
The garage floor as a workbench
My garage workbench is 30 inches deep, and you need to get around all four sides of a screen with the roller, so the screens went down flat on a sheet of cardboard on the garage floor instead. I boxed each frame in with scraps of 2x4 laid tight against its sides. That kept it from sliding around and, more important, kept the long sides from bowing inward as the spline went in.
The process goes like this: pry out the old spline with a pick, peel off the old mesh and wipe the channel clean. Lay the new mesh over the frame with about an inch of overhang all around. Run the convex wheel along the channel to crease the mesh down into it, then follow with the concave wheel to press the spline in on top. Trim the extra mesh with a sharp blade angled toward the outside edge so you don't slice what you just installed.
Spline tension, and the corner trick I learned late
Screen one came out tight as a drum, and I was proud of it for about ten seconds. Then I picked it up and saw that the long sides had pulled inward. It was shaped like an hourglass and wouldn't go back into the window. I'd been pulling the mesh tight with one hand while rolling with the other, and stretching the spline as I fed it in. Both turned out to be wrong. Pressing the spline into the channel pulls the mesh tight on its own. If you stretch the spline, it creeps back later and pulls out of the corners. I redid that one with the mesh just snug and the spline laid in loose, and it came out flat.
The corner trick I didn't figure out until screen five: before rolling, cut a small diagonal notch out of the mesh at each corner, just outside the channel. Without it, the extra fabric bunches in the corner and fights the spline, and you get a lumpy little pucker. With it, the corner folds in clean. I also stopped cutting the spline at each corner. One continuous piece around the whole frame, pushed into the corners with the tip of a flat screwdriver, held better than four separate pieces ever did.
Screens two through four are fine. Five and six are better than fine, the kind you could show Gary without explaining anything. Number one, the redo, went back into the office window, which means it's the one Moose tests first.
He tested it last night. It held. He looked personally offended.
