Instant Screen Door: Lets the Breeze Through, Keeps the Bugs Out!

Since we live in a place where air conditioning is not mandatory we spend a lot of time with the doors and windows open. You might think no air condition is a good thing but not so when it gets too warm for comfort in the house most days and, wouldn’t you know it, the bugs start working their way into the house each and every night when we leave the doors open for the breeze. Half the time I’m running around the house with a fly swatter. 😉

Something HAD to be done.

As luck would have it, my wife was visiting some people who had an instant screen door which seemed to be the perfect solution since we’re currently renting and din’t want to buy a permanent screen door to install. Actually, we bought two of these Instant Screen Doors so we could get a good cross-draft going. Here’s what it looks like hanging in our front door:

If you weren’t paying attention you might actually run into it. Anyway, thus far we’ve been very pleased with the results. In just a few minutes we had it setup. There are actually two ways to hang the instant screen door. You can either use velcro or the included tension rod, which is what we choose to do:

I know you can’t see it well but there really IS a rod that feeds through the upper part of the screen door. FYI, that’s also where you can attach the velcro if you like but I didn’t want to mess up the door woodwork too much because the velcro strips are actually quite large and aren’t the cheap stuff that falls off when you breathe on it.

I did have to put in four small velcro pieces (two on each side of the screen door) in order to keep it from being blown in when the wind blows:

You may not have to use velcro on the sides most of the time but we wanted to ensure the bugs stayed out. 🙂 Moreover, the instant screen door is actually weighted on the bottom which helps to keep it in place:

Overall, it fits well in the 36″ wide front door and works for the narrower back door but the top (where the velcro and tension rod go) gets bunched up quite a bit on the narrower door, so keep this in mind. For us it’s not much of a problem but know that the screen door won’t look quite as good in a narrow door and will bow in the middle. That said, here’s what it looks like on our front door with it closed:

Although you could keep it up all the time we don’t. There is a grab handle to use but we rarely use it since we have to undo the velcro on the sides first anyway. Because we’re already doing that we just grab the side of the screen door mesh and move it out of the way.

I should note that there are other easy screen doors besides this one, some of which have a split down the middle to make it easy to walk through.

Overall, we’re quite pleased with the Instant Screen Door we purchased but it’s probably not the best option if you intend to leave it up and need to get through it a lot. If you’re able to take it down each night then it’s definitely a good option and seems like it will last quite a while.