Pro Handyman Blog

If you have had it with your sliding screen door don’t lose hope. These are found on your sliding glass door or on French doors in particular. The neat thing about these screen doors is that when you don’t want to open the doors to ventilate the room, they retract into a jamb and disappear. This makes it so your view out of the window is not obscured by the mesh of the screen. When you want to engage the screen, you simply pull it out of the special jamb where it resides. It’s almost like a window blind that operates horizontally rather than vertically.

You can buy these at most home centers and they are straightforward to install. The jamb (its like a tube) sits vertically on one side of the door opening. You must mount this tube so that it is plumb on the side of the door jamb. This is held in place with a series of screws.

At the top and bottom of the opening, you will install the rails that will act as guides for the screen as you pull it out. You have to install these perpendicular to the tube so that the screen pulls out and retracts easily.

These types of screens work great on French doors where you can’t have a frames sliding screen door. With a disappearing screen door, you can pull it out and open both sides of the French doors. When you want to close the doors, you can retract the screen to preserve your view.