Screen Dog Doors
There are many types of screen dog doors available. All of them are designed to fit in the lower corner of your screen door closest to the door lock side. Most often its the screen cloth alone that holds the dog door in place.
These types of pet door are easy enough for the homeowner to install themself. Installation just requires patience and a little planning. First mark the location of the dog door with masking tape before you attempt to remove the screen door. The reason for this is that once the screen door is out, its often hard to tell the top from the bottom. Screen doors are usually symmetrical so you need a mark to remind you where the bottom is.
The next thing you need is a thick flat piece of wood a little larger than the dog door you purchased. You are going to push this underneath the place where you intend to install the screen dog door. You need it so you have a stable surface to push against when you are reinstalling the screen.
Most dog doors require you to cut a rectangular hole in your existing screen cloth. You do this by placing your wooden support plate underneath the screen cloth with one half of the dog door on top of the support plate. You can then use the grooves in the dog door to guide your knife as you cut the rectangular hole in your screen cloth.
Then the other half of the dog door is forced on top of the existing half using a rubber mallet to force the vinyl dog door halves to click together. Other types of dog door require you to roll the screen all around the dog door using a scren roller and spline.
Screen mounted dog doors work well cats and small dogs but once a heavy dog uses it the door can quickly fall apart. The screen door is not a very strong place to hang anything from and it cannot stand up to large dogs rubbing against the dog door frame for very long. For larger dogs you need a seperate dog door mounted in a frame beside the patio door. These types of patio dog doors are made with a variety of options from basic flap models all the way up to doors that can sense your pet from twenty feet away using a special electronic collar.
The tall patio dog door is shown in the picture below and to the left. On the right are some of the current sales on Ebay for dog doors, EBay is a great place to find bargains on screen dog doors if you are not close to a large home improvement warehouse or big hardware store.
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