Screen doors fail in more ways than any other door in the house — mesh, frame, rollers, latch, corners — and each failure has a different honest answer. This is the checklist we work through on screen visits, in the order we check it, so you can grade your own door before you call anyone.
Check 1: The mesh
Tears, slack, edges pulling from the channel, fabric gone brittle with sun: mesh failure is the most common and the most repairable. If the frame passes the checks below, rescreening restores the door completely — new fabric, new spline, proper tension. Choose the mesh for your household: standard fiberglass for ordinary duty, pet-resistant mesh if animals push and claw, fine mesh where the insects are tiny, solar mesh on sun-blasted exposures. Mesh failure alone almost never justifies a new door.
Check 2: The frame, sighted like a rifle
Close one eye and sight down each rail. A straight frame holds a gentle rescreen beautifully. A frame bowed in the middle — walked into, climbed, forced — will never hold even tension: the mesh drums, the spline pops at the bow by midsummer, and you have bought the same repair twice. One gentle bend can sometimes be coaxed back; a bow in two directions, or bends in multiple rails, is the frame telling you its career is over. This single check decides more repair-or-replace questions than all the others combined, and it is why our screen service assesses the frame before quoting fabric.
Check 3: The corners
Screen frames are held square by corner keys, and cracked or loose corners let the whole rectangle become a parallelogram. A door that is out of square drags, will not latch, and sheds its mesh tension corner by corner. Sound corners that have merely loosened can be re-keyed and squared. Corners cracked through the rail itself belong to a frame in its final season.
Check 4: The running gear
Screen rollers are small, cheap and constantly underestimated: a screen that falls from its track, drags, or needs lifting at one end is usually asking for its wheels and a track clean, not a new door. Latches similarly: tired springs and rounded plastic catches are parts, not obituaries. Running gear failure is repairable failure — budget it as such, and be suspicious of any quote that converts worn screen rollers into a whole new door.
Check 5: The count of past repairs
The tiebreaker. A door rescreened twice on a straight frame is a maintained door. A door rescreened twice on a frame that has been "straightened" twice is a subscription. When the honest repairs start repeating inside a couple of seasons, the frame is the message: replace the door once, correctly measured, with the mesh your household actually needs, and restart the clock at ten years instead of two.
One more variable: who uses the door
The checklist grades the door; the household grades the urgency. A screen on a door opened forty times a day by children and dogs lives closer to its limits than the same screen on a quiet side door, and a frame that would pass for a retired couple's lanai may not survive a summer of grandchildren. When we grade screens in person, tell us who actually uses the door and how — it changes the mesh we recommend (pet mesh earns its price in exactly one of those households) and sometimes changes the verdict itself, from "rescreen it" to "this frame will not survive your summer." The right answer is the one matched to your traffic, not the one matched to an average door in an average house.
What replacement should look like
A replacement screen is measured to your opening — not pulled from a nominal size bin — with the track profile confirmed, rollers and latch fitted and adjusted, and the mesh specified for your life: pet mesh at animal height, fine mesh for no-see-um country, solar for the west wall. It should glide on a finger, latch without a technique, and sit square with even reveals. Done that way, replacement is not the expensive option; done by halves every second summer, repair is. Wherever your door lands on the checklist, the visit that grades it is quick — and the grading, in our shop, comes with the door's bow shown to you in person rather than described.