Porches That Have Already Had a Life
Screen America repairs, rescreens and rebuilds screen porches in Dunwoody. Most of what we are asked to do here is different from the newer parts of the metro, and the reason is the housing.
Dunwoody was largely built between the 1960s and the 1980s. A great many of those houses have a screened porch that came with them or was added not long after — which makes it forty or fifty years old. It is rarely a question of building something new. It is a question of what is worth keeping.
What Actually Fails on a Porch That Age
These fail in a predictable order, and knowing the order is most of deciding what to spend:
- The mesh, several times over. Fibreglass gets about ten to fifteen years before ultraviolet light makes it brittle. On a fifty-year-old porch it has usually been replaced two or three times already, sometimes badly.
- The spline and the channel. The rubber cord holding the mesh into the frame goes hard and shrinks. Once the channel itself is worn, new mesh will not hold in it and the frame member has to be dealt with rather than re-splined again.
- The bottom rail and the kick panel. The lowest part takes the water, the mower and the dog. On a wood-framed porch this is where rot starts.
- The door. Fifty years of slamming takes a screen door out of square long before anything else on the porch is finished.
- The structure, occasionally. Posts sitting directly on a slab without a standoff, or a ledger that was never flashed, are the two that turn a repair into a rebuild.
Repair, Rescreen or Rebuild
These are three different amounts of money and we would rather tell you which one you need than sell you the largest.
- Repair — a panel or two, a door that needs rehanging, a section of spline. The frame is sound and stays.
- Rescreen — all the mesh replaced throughout, keeping the existing frame. This is the usual answer on a porch whose structure has been looked after, and it makes a forty-year-old porch look nearly new for a fraction of a rebuild.
- Rebuild — new framing, sometimes new footings or posts, then new screen. The honest answer when the channel is worn out along every member or the timber has gone at the base.
Mature tree canopy is worth mentioning because Dunwoody has a lot of it. Constant leaf litter and pollen hold moisture against the frame and against the deck boards, so porches under heavy canopy tend to reach the rebuild end of that list sooner than open ones do.
Where We Are, Plainly
We work from Ball Ground, north of the metro. Dunwoody is a drive for us, not a local call, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise. It does not change the price and it has not stopped us working across the northern half of the metro for years — Atlanta, Roswell, Marietta and Johns Creek are all on that list.
What it does mean in practice: we would rather do the whole job in one visit than make several short ones, and photographs first help a great deal. Our contact form takes them directly, and for screen work we can usually give you a number from photographs without coming out at all.
If You Want More Than Screen
On an older porch that is being rebuilt anyway, it is worth asking whether you want it closed in rather than screened. A panel enclosure buys you the shoulder seasons; a sunroom is a different project again. Neither is automatically better than a screen porch — they cost more and they change what the space feels like — but a rebuild is the moment to decide, because the framing differs.
Get a Free Assessment
If you have a screen porch in Dunwoody that has seen better decades, send us photographs or ask us out to look at it. We will tell you whether it wants repairing, rescreening or rebuilding, and the assessment costs nothing.
Get a free estimate now