Eight kinds of job. They are not variations on each other.
Most screen companies list “rescreens and repairs” and let you work out the rest. These eight things fail differently, get priced differently, and only some of them involve the building department. If what you need is not here, we will tell you who does it rather than learn on your cage.
| Work | What it actually is | Specified as | Permit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full rescreen | Every panel out, every groove cleaned, all new spline. The job you do once instead of chasing panels for three seasons. | 18×14 / 20×20 / pet | Permit: no |
| Panel repair | One or two panels replaced in an otherwise sound cage. Honest about the fact that a new panel looks new. | .140 vinyl spline | Permit: no |
| Storm repair | Frame first, mesh second. A blown panel with a straight frame is the system working; a bent beam is not a screen job. | Frame assessed first | Permit: sometimes |
| New enclosure | Engineered drawings, a design wind speed for your address, a permit, and beam sizes that suit the span. | Engineered, sealed | Permit: yes |
| Pool cage rebuild | When the frame, not the screen, has reached the end. Partial rebuilds, beam and post replacement, re-anchoring. | 2x5 / 2x6 SMB posts | Permit: usually |
| Screen doors | The part of a cage that gets used ten times a day and is built like the part that never moves. | Corner keys, brace, closer | Permit: no |
| Front entry screens | Entryways and porch screening — smaller spans, tighter tolerances, and it is the first thing anyone sees. | Framed to the opening | Permit: sometimes |
| Aluminum railings | Pool deck, porch and balcony rail. Load-rated, and the posts are anchored the same way the cage posts are. | Load-rated, powder coat | Permit: sometimes |
One drawn detail for every row of the schedule above.
A schedule tells you what the work is called. A detail tells you what it actually consists of, which is the part that decides whether it lasts. These are the ten we get asked about most, drawn the same way they are specified on your quote.
Screen work
Panel repair is the smallest thing we do and often the right one. If the frame is sound and two panels have torn — a branch, a chair leg, a ball — there is no reason to rescreen a cage that is otherwise doing its job. We will say so.
A full rescreen is what a cage past roughly its first decade usually wants. Mesh ages by ultraviolet exposure, and every panel on your cage has had the same exposure. When one goes, the rest are not far behind, and the difference in cost between doing them together and doing them one at a time over three years is not close.
Kick plates are the solid panels along the bottom of the wall bays, usually sixteen to twenty inches high. They exist because the bottom of a screen is where dogs, mowers, chairs, feet and hoses live. Adding them where they are missing is cheaper than replacing the same lower panels every year, and much cheaper than framing.
Frame work
Storm repair begins as an inspection, not a quote. Screen is meant to blow out; that is the panel acting as a fuse so the frame survives. What we are looking at after a storm is whether the fuse did its job or whether the frame took the load: beams out of line, splices opened, posts out of plumb, base anchors moved.
Rebuilds range from replacing a single beam to taking a wall down to the deck and putting a new one up. Where structural members change, so does the permit position, and we sort that out before anything is ordered.
New enclosures come with engineered drawings sealed for your address and its design wind speed. That is not optional paperwork — it is what makes the difference between a cage and a large aluminum kite.
Doors, entries and rail
Screen doors are the moving part of a static structure and they are usually built like the static part. A door is a light aluminum rectangle with nothing resisting diagonal movement, so every time it is pulled, slammed or leaned on, it racks a little further out of square and starts dragging on the corner diagonally opposite the hinges. Tightening the corners does not hold. It comes back.
Front entry screening is a different discipline to a pool cage. The spans are short, the openings are rarely square, and everybody who comes to your house looks at it from three feet away. Tolerances that would be invisible on a forty-foot cage are the whole job here.
Railings come from the same aluminum supply chain as the cage, they anchor into the same deck the same way, and they age at the same points. Where a rail is required for a change in level, it has to be load-rated and it has to be anchored to hold that rating — which means the anchor schedule matters far more than the color.
What we do not do. We do not pour or repair concrete decks, we do not touch pool equipment or plumbing, we do not do roofing where a cage ties into a shingle roof line, and we do not do glass or vinyl panel conversions. All of those are somebody’s actual trade. We will tell you what your cage needs from them so it gets done in the right order.
Not sure which of these you have?
That is normal, and it is what the visit decides. Describe what you are seeing and somebody will tell you whether it is a panel, a rescreen or a frame.