Question on rescreening screened porch

Hi,

I'm rescreening my screened porch, which has brick walls to waist height, and then wood framing above and had aluminum screens stapled to the wood frame and covered with trim. The windows are inset between larger posts. Because they are inset, I cannot use a product like Screen-tite unless I want to build the window frames out flush, and that's too involved for me. So I am just building screen frames with the extruded aluminum parts that you can buy at Home Despots.

  1. My first question has to do with the best way to attach the aluminum screen frame to the wood window framing. It looks like the easiest and best way to do this would be to simply screw the screen frames to the wood. I've bought some #8x1 pan head Phillips self- tapping machine screws for this purpose, but I am wondering if this is really doable given how malleable the extruded aluminum is. Do I need to predrill it to keep it from warping or bending in wierd ways? Or does no person in his right mind attempt to put screws through these things?

  1. My second question is whether a 9 pound cat, climbing one of these screens, will be able to pull the spline out of the channels, and if so, what else I might do to keep this from happening? Thought about crimping the spline channel with a pair of pliers. Is there a downside to this?

Advice appreciated and thanks in advance,

Melissa

Reply to
Melissa
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mirror clips?

probably. teach it to not do that with a squirt bottle. you can get cat-proof screen. you could also make (have made) an L shaped piece of wood that would fit over the screen edges, and screw the wood frame into the window frame. that would prevent the spline from come out.

Reply to
charlie

Mirror clips are an interesting idea. Thanks, I'll take a look.

The second idea -- the L shaped piece of wood -- would in theory require screwing through the aluminum frame, so supposedly this is doable?

Thanks!

Reply to
Melissa

if the length of L against the wood frame was large enough, no, you'd not have to go through the aluminium frame.

Reply to
charlie

I'm still interested in hearing whether anyone has drilled and screwed through these aluminum frames and what their experience was. Thanks.

Reply to
Melissa

HI charlie! Thanks for quoting. Can you tell Melissa how to shift her ourbound posted address to not be @gmail so she can be seen by the roughly

60% (guessing) of us who spam filter that out?

Melissa, you will see me but unless another quotes your reply back to me, I wnt see any answer til you do this. It's not YOUR fault but too many spammers use unfiltered @gmail accounts so a huge number block them. Your note was collateral damage though you are innocent of this.

Easy to do. There was a long thread just in the past month on how to do this sort of porch but it didnt involve aluminum screens.

Can you describe what you mean by 'inset'?

To me this means I have a 4 inch or so beam and the screens are at mid-way (2 inches in with room on both sides).

Predrill, but personally I would not have used metal screening at all. It would be actually faster to just use thin molding wood and a staple gun to the wood frames.

Hehe cats too eh? I know how that goes. No, you cant keep the cat off the ledge and will just have to rescreen now and again at their favorite laying spots.

His idea of the wood will just make the cat unhappy. It sits there because it likes to be there in the breeze and watch the birds. It's worth the trouble to have to adjust a wood framed (faster to install and fix) if you got cats.

Hey anything for a fellow cat lover! Now to teach my 50lb dog that my 12lb cat doesnt actually enjoy having her butt sniffed with his cold wet nose even if she puts up with it. (Yeah that's us, cats and dogs, living in sin).

Reply to
cshenk

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