Dwelling

Magnetic Screen Door

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Keep bugs out

These “screen doors” are really just net barriers for doorways that you can just walk through and the magnetic strips draw them closed again. Duh. But you get to show visitors how they work because they’re alien… I’d never heard of nor seen these things until I was in Alaska at a B&B (no hotels in the area). Not just regular external doors had these things but a lot of internal ones too – there are so many mosquitoes there in the summer that extreme measures are appropriate. Just push your way through, either direction. It closes behind you. Gives you a chance to kill the bugs in your room without more taking the place of their fallen comrades. Nothing will perfectly keep mosquitoes out of anywhere there because there are *so many*.

Anyway, at our Colorado house there are just enough flies (not mosquitoes) zipping around to get trapped in the house even when the slider’s wide open. Having lots of dogs in the neighborhood doesn’t help, either. They’re easy to mount to your door frame, though most of them come with sticky-backed Velcro which – you know it before you try it – won’t last nearly as long as you want it to. So we used some tacks. And the one at the overhead center I changed from a tack to a little screw as the in-and-out worked the initial tack there loose. The “screen door” needs a mount/tack at each corner, the top-center (a saggy top won’t let the thing close easily) and a couple on the sides, so I’d advise evaluating your door frame molding to ID the net size and best mounting materials before getting angry at whatever you try.

In our home, the open slider door also blocks the dog door, and this simple screen door lets the dogs in & out without issue. Old-style slappy screen doors aren’t so dog friendly. So: There are a lot of sizes available, so measure. And these aren’t disposable exactly but they aren’t long-term investments either. They’re good at keeping bugs out and freely letting everyone else through.

-- Wayne Ruffner 04/12/18

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