The Wexford Screen

The Wexford Screen is a 1958 aluminum-framed screen door with the original bronze mesh still intact, which puts it in roughly the top one percent of surviving screen doors of the period. Bronze mesh oxidizes to a deep brown that aluminum and fiberglass never reach. The kick panel has hand-painted house numbers — 1413 — that were touched up in the 1980s and again in the 2000s by successive owners. We love it because every dog the family ever owned signed it.

The screen door is the most-touched architectural element in a typical American home, and the most disposable. A bronze-mesh original from 1958 should not exist; mesh degrades, frames bend, springs lose tension. The Wexford Screen survived because the family that owned it never had the time to replace it, and then they couldn’t.

The push panel is the story. It’s a single piece of yellow pine, about four inches wide, set across the lower third of the door — the part dogs push to come inside. The current paint shows three layers when you look at the chipped corners: a deep navy from the original install, a faded blue from a 1980s repaint, and the current cream, applied in 2003. The hand-painted “1413” is from the cream layer.

The bronze mesh has oxidized to the rich brown that fiberglass cannot fake. It also has three small repairs — two patches and one clean weld — that we have intentionally not corrected. The repairs are part of the door’s history.

If you have a screen door, please consider that it is also a record.