LARSON E200038481 84x81 WHT DBL Scr Door

The premise of this door is excellent! It just falls a smidgen short of 5 stars. Installation is a pain. The slider can pop out of the track if you are not careful. Directions leave something to be desired. After all the bad, this truly is a good looking screen door. It functions well, and I'm happy with the purchase! Let's see how it stands the test of time.

Finished installing the doors yesterday and so far I am very happy with them. The quality seems good. I wasn't sure if they would be sturdy but once they were all installed they are plenty sturdy. I wouldn't recommend kids use the door, but for adults being relatively careful with opening and closing it works really good.Screen material - very sheer as the picture shows so it doesn't block the view. The screen slides in brush pile in the top and bottom guides. I don't know how this will hold up in the long run but is working well now.Cartridges - work well, I'll update the review in 6 months once they have some use on them.I did a lot of research and this was the door recommended for do-it-yourself project by an experienced installer. I agree with his recommendation that this would be an experienced do-it-yourself project. My husband is a carpenter and we customized the installation a lot to fit the screen doors to our french doors.The doors are expensive compared to a screen for a sliding door, but compared to a custom installation of a retractable screen, the cost was much cheaper.These doors are in my bedroom and we slept last night with the french doors open and the screen doors closed and it was so open and refreshing yet still felt safe from bugs and critters coming in.

I just got done installing this door. I would not recommend trying to install it if you are not at least of moderate to high skill of handiness. I am very experienced in handyman skills, and it took me 2 hours and a bit of head scratching to figure the whole thing out, but you can do it if you know how.The instructions are a mess, and very complicated. I recommend giving them a read through before starting (as with any project, really.) and then inspecting all of the parts carefully to understand how things fit together. There are sections missing from the instructions and doing this first will help you when you come to it.Otherwise, it seems to be sturdy and high quality. It opens and closes as I expect it to, and although the instructions did not fully fit to my door, I figured out how to get it installed. You will run into problems if you have ceramic or hard tiled floors but, again, you can wing it if you know what you're doing.I will update this review in a month to indicate how well the door is holding up to use.

The quality of the instruction sheet was very poor--hardly readable. It looked like a copy of a copy of a copy. Fortunately I installed the same Larson doors about 5 years ago on another house so I was somewhat familiar with what had to be done. Most of the installation went fairly well. This screen was installed inside since my double doors swing out. I had to make some modifications and adjustments as the job progressed. Larson claims that the minimum height is 79". My opening is EXACTLY 79" but I had to be creative to make the upright pieces fit. A little sanding to reduce the thickness of the top end caps did the trick--barely. Also had trouble with the mounting clips. They would not securely engage the upright channels. That was fixed by shimming each clip with a couple of flat washers to position them farther away from the door frame.Since I was doing an "inside the house" installation,that created another problem. When the transition ramp piece was put in place that left no place to mount the lower slide bolt receiver. Drilling a hole in the transition ramp solved that problem. The bolt just slides into the hole and holds the inactive door open.Once all the modifications were made the doors work great! I especially like the addition of the small rubber bumpers that keep the doors from slamming when accidentally released. This was a major sore spot on my old doors which didn't have the bumpersI would recommend these doors but to install them you should have some planning skills as well as a little ingenuity.

After a few glitches, the door functions as it should. Initial shipping by Amazon vendor was extremely fast arriving 2 days after placing the order! However, during the installation I found the top and bottom runners to have been bent (in shipping?). Larson would not warrant the shipping damage because Amazon is not an authorized dealer. The damage was fixed in short repair and installation was complete. With in 24 hours, one of the screens became unattached from the pull bar. Larson was great in sending a replacement with in a week. I was dissapointed in not being able to use the door as an inside mount and had to mount on the outside of the frame. The door must be custom cut by Larson. Larson's website does not do a very good job and advising new owners how or where to purchase the product. I was unable to find a local dealer, in San Antonio. We use the door on a daily basis and hope that the door lasts, of which I am doubtful due to lack of confidence in the screen and mechanism. We have had other Larson products and have found them exceptional.

As others have noted, the screens retract inside a tube on either side of the door when opened. They are held closed by magnetic strips.The magnetic strips are quite strong. I have noticed the force required to pull the doors open often places uneven pressure toward the bottom of the screen making the closing rod tilt in the track and come out of the track top and bottom.I put electrical tape the length of the magnets to try to separate them and reduce the magnetic force. This helped some but if we are not slow and deliberate in pulling the door open, it still comes open unevenly and jumps the track.I contacted Larson tech support and the technician went and tried it on a model she had and confirmed the strong magnets but could offer no advice on the jumping the track. She made it seem like they had never heard of the issue before.