Door installation and repair in St. Catharines

A slider parks its leaves behind each other and always leaves at least one panel across the opening, so a two-leaf slider gives you roughly half the opening. A folding door concertinas its leaves flat against one another and stacks them at the jamb, so it can open almost the entire width. That is the reason to pay more for one. The trade-off is that a slider is simpler, seals more easily and has fewer moving parts, which is why we still specify sliders for most everyday entrances.

A primed steel door left unpainted at an exterior opening will, particularly along the bottom rail where salt and meltwater sit. The specification that prevents it is galvannealed steel — a zinc-iron coating bonded to the sheet before the door is made, which paint holds to and which keeps rusting from spreading under a scratch. We specify galvannealed on every exterior opening and stainless where washdown or chemicals are involved.

We will quote them on request, but we do not promote them and we no longer fit the light imported bars we used to — they were too flimsy to be worth the money once they were on the wall. For an opening nobody looks through, a properly made fixed guard is still the least expensive permanent barrier there is. For anything with a view, a display, or any chance of being used as an escape route from a room, a fixed bar is the wrong product: it cannot be opened. On those openings we steer people to a folding gate or a rolling shutter, which cost more and are worth it.

No. Most of the openings under our plans were installed by someone else, often decades ago, and a survey does not care who supplied them. We hold parts for the makes common in Ontario buildings and can adapt hardware for doors whose manufacturer no longer exists.

Break-out means the sliding leaves swing outward when pushed hard from inside, giving a clear opening even with no power. On an exit route it is not optional, because the door has to release people during a power failure or an evacuation. It has to be specified with the door — the leaves, the hardware and the header are all different — so it cannot be added afterwards without replacing them. If you are not sure whether an existing slider breaks out, we check it as part of an inspection.

It cannot be cleaned, and no one can clean it — the moisture is sealed inside. A double-glazed window is an insulating glass unit: two panes bonded to a spacer with a sealed cavity of dry air or argon between them. When the edge seal fails, humid air gets into that cavity and condenses on the inside faces, which is the haze you are seeing. There is no access to those surfaces without destroying the unit. The fix is to replace the sealed unit, and because the frame is untouched this is reglazing rather than window replacement.