Just curious, how does everyone deal with broken window screens? Aside from annotating, does anyone offer to repair or do you have a referral service like Home Depot etc… also do you see any profit in it?
You can make $100+ per hour repairing them.
That’s a huge wow! Do u mind if I ask how you price them? Do you fix them onsite?
Don
Yup. I usually charge about $25-30 per regular rescreen. Fix on site maybe do one screen in about 5-10 minutes. So even going slow that’s five or six screens per hour $125-$150.
To completely make a new screen maybe 35-45 per.
I don’t like doing screen doors but those would start at $50 (maybe closer to $75) for a rescreen. I never built one.
It’s a HUGE upsell. I had one house we did quarterly and she wanted all the screens redone. The windows were $250 and the screens were over $500.
I made a table for the back of my truck 4’x4’ and would just roll it out and hang it off the back of my tailgate. It was just tall enough to slide my little giant under and help keep everything organized. Definitely get yourself a jig (you can order one from homedepot) and it’s a big help.
Great upsell as @JaredAI said. We make 75-100 hour typically when we rescreen. Sometimes we do several or sometimes a lot. Screens get dry rotted and rip or tear easy, we do them because we do 90-95 residential, so works out good. We only replace what needs to be replaced. So it’s unusual fir us to do a whole house but it can happen. Good for customer service too.
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Do you guys know of any youtube videos or anything like that on how to do this?
Also where do you get the materials for the frames. I know homedepot has the mesh to replace. But I have never seen the frames.
Call around and you probably have a local shop that can sell you the materials. I’d buy the frame, corners, springs, and pulls from a local shop and then the mesh from hd.
Mark Strange at beautiful view had a pretty good video on rescreening. For normal screens I’d usually do the short sides first. But for large screens I’d do the long sides first. If you do opposite sides it’ll help prevent bowing. I personally never started on one corner and went all the way around.
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Jared, like a window install type place? Or more a hard wear store?
Yeah, call around to some glass places and see if they sell screen material. I know a lot of people use CL Lawrence for materials, but I never used them. You can also get a bunch of stuff off amazon.
I’d buy pull tabs for like 10cents, corners for like 30 cents… but you can get pull tabs on amazon 100 for like 7 bucks, 100 corners for 17. Personally, I’d figure out what the most common colors are in your area and order off amazon. I’d carry mostly white corners but then I’d have a few almond and a few bronze. Pull tabs were always black and springs are always the same.
I’d mostly reuse the spline unless it was really sun worn, but again, you’ll have to figure out what the most common spline size is in your area. The screen place near me would always sell 140, but I mostly used 250.
For frame material, might be easier to get locally since I’d buy like 12’ sections. But again, check amazon. I didn’t usually stock a bunch of material and just buy it as I needed it.
Then for the uncommon screens, like the ones with spring pins, or something weird, having a local place to buy just what you need is nice.
Oh you can hit harbor freight and get a set of $0.99 picks and those are really handy for pull out old spline or pushing in new spline in the corners.
Here’s Marks video in case you didn’t see it.
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Jared,
Your the man! Thanks dude!