Screen test

Hey, what's up, dogs?  One of the side effects of stay-at-home orders is that you start to notice little...er...imperfections around the house that need fixing. 

Case in point:  these holes in our window screen.  My human tells me that there was a dog among the previous residents of this house, and I'd guess he/she put his/her paw through the screen, resulting in this damage.  Some canines are so excitable...

So today, we're going to patch the screen.  My human ventured out to the hardware store (carefully, wearing a face mask) and brought home a couple of packages of self-adhesive window screen patch.  We've never done this before, so we'll start with the smaller hole first, for practice. 

First, we need to square up the edges of the hole so the patch looks neater.  Out with the scissors.  Snip snip…

Then we cut a rectangular patch that's somewhat larger than the hole, hold it in place, and hit it with a hair dryer for about 30 seconds.  This melts the adhesive on the patch and sticks it to the existing screen.  

Voila!  Hole patched. 

The patch is definitely noticeable, but we're not too worried about its appearance.  At long as it keeps the bugs out, we'll be happy.  

Right...on to the big hole.  Same steps.

 Wow, this hole is big.  I can still put my paw through to the other side.  Looks like it'll take another patch.

Some lessons we learned...

1)  The small hole was much easier to patch than the large one. 

2)  For the large hole, it would have helped to have somebody on the other side of the window, pushing back against the screen while we used the hair dryer.  It would have minimized "screen floppiness." 

Fast forward fifteen minutes, and we're done.  This is what it looks like from the outside.

There you have it...our first window screen repair, courtesy of ScreenMend (TM).  Hope it lasts!  See you next time...