Screen Houses and
Screen Porch information

Nowadays there are much better ways of building screen houses than the old method of stapling up screen cloth and nailing decorative trim over the staples.

You can make aluminum screen frames which you can easily remove when they get damaged. No need to take down huge sheets of screen cloth and spend hours pulling out old rusty staples !

There are vinyl strips with spline channels molded into them so you can roll the screen cloth right in after nailing up one of these spline channels. Changing the screen cloth is as easy as pulling the spline out.

The Screen Bar System

Heavy duty lipped screen porch bar

This is an example of a heavy duty screen bar with a 1/2" flange or lip. The lip has the advantage that you can screw your screen frames directly to the 2x4 or 4x4 framing of your screen house or porch. With recular rectangular screens bars, you normally have to install a 1x1 cleat inside the framed openings so that you have something to screw into. The heavy duty screen bar eliminates the need for any cleats.

The outside face of the screen bar is smooth and overlaps the wooden framing neatly and cleanly. The joints are mitered and the frames are fabricated to size, assembled and screened before installing onto the wooden framing. If the screen ever gets ripped or torn, its easy enough to remove the screws holding the frame on and take the whole thing down for resecreening. Much safer than balancing on a stepladder with staple gun in one habd and a roll of screen cloth in the other !

Looking in the end of the bar you can clearly see the lip and the spline channel on the opposite side. You can also see the friction fit corners that hold the screen bar together. The corners are thermoplastic, and one big advantage of that is that you can have the corners custom bent to fit angles other than 90 degrees. Useful when you have a sloping roof or an irregular shaped opening.

If you think these screen bars could be useful on your next project, send me a sketch such as the one above. The bars can be cut to the sizes you need and shipped to you ready for assembly, screening and installation.

Installing screens over wooden framing is one way of a building a screen porch. The sun room patio enclosure page talks about all aluminum framed screen enclosures.

The condominium screen porch page talks about how screen porches are used on balconies in low rise and high rise condominiums.

Screen Material for your Screen House

Fiberglass screen cloth is the most commonly used material, you can find information on it here... Fiberglass Screen

Aluminum screen cloth can also be used, although it does require a bit of practice because it is easy to rip during installation. I would not reccomend aluminum screen if you are using the "Screen Tight" system but if you are building a screen porch in the conventional way, with wooden cleats, stapling everything in place as you go, aluminum screening is no problem. Heres the information link to Aluminum Screening

You might also want to consider fiberglass solar screen to screen your porch. The great thing about solar screen is that it provides shade as well as keeps the bugs out. It also will protect your porch furniture from fading to a much better degree than regular screening. For more information check out the page on Solar Screen

This page talks about screen houses and enclosures that you can take with you on vacation to the cottage, camping or to the beach... screen tents style screen houses

The advantage of the screen tent style is that you can collapse it and store it away during the winter. The colder months really take a toll on screen porches with heavy snow that pushes the screen cloth out its frame and Ultraviolet radiation the makes plastics brittle and prone to cracking.

You can make portable screen houses last a lot longer by keeping them in covered storage during extreme weather.

This link takes you to a page where I provide information for people building their own screen houses from scratch. Screen Porch Design For help with Screened Enclosures click on the link



The "screen gazebo page" talks about screen houses that are more like the aluminum screen gazebo pictured below.

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