If you have any furry creatures in your home, you may have a screen or two that look a little worn out. With Spring comes the perfect time to update the parts of your home that got a little beaten up over the winter. For us, it was the screens. We took advantage of the first nice weekend and did some screen replacing.

Replacing the screen

Unfortunately, we live in a time where, if something is broken—or in this case ripped—our first instinct is to just throw it out and buy a new one. So, once looking into buying entirely new screens, I was delighted to find out all I needed to do is replace what was broken—the actual screen. The other upside was that it was fairly simple to do.

We only needed a few tools and supplies:

• Screen (I choose fiberglass)
• Spline (thin rubber insert that holds the screen in place with the frame)
• Spline Tool
• Flat-Head screwdriver
• Utility Knife

Tools of the trade!

Unfortunately, when I replaced the screen I was still living out of boxes and couldn’t find my utility knife, so I ended up using an X-Acto knife instead, which worked well.

The first step was to remove the old damaged screen, which is easy enough. I simply used the flat-head screwdriver to pop out the old spline then removed the old screen.

The next step was to lay out the new screen. If you’re like me, you'll just roughly measure out the screen. I just made sure that there was enough overhang to ensure there was enough on each side and that the screen wouldn't fall short of the frame.

Overhang is key.

Using the spline tool, I fit the screen right into the track. There are 2 ends of this tool: the concave side and the convex side. When laying the screen over the frame, be sure to use the concave side of the tool to place and smooth out the screen in the groove before inserting the spline.

I did this process one side at a time and, once the screen was smoothed out with the tool, I lay the spline in the groove and turned the tool around. Then I used the convex side to push the spline in securely.

Trimming the excess.

I chose to use one whole piece of spline instead of trimming it at each side. I continued this process for the rest of the three sides. Once I got to the end, I cut the spline and went one more time around with the tool to make sure it was secure. Then, I took my flat head screwdriver and made sure all the corners were also secure.

Once I was happy with everything, the last step was to carefully trim the excess screen as close to the frame as possible.

That was it—I was done!

The toughest part was making sure the screen was taut. For my first go at it, I thought it went pretty well.