Regina sits on some of the most reactive soil in Canada. Local builders call it gumbo. Geotechnically it is a montmorillonite-rich clay, the mineral that, in the words of one engineering survey, “can expand to several times its original volume when exposed to wet conditions,” then shrinks hard as it dries. Over a Regina year that soil moves, and the houses on it move with it. Basements crack, door frames go out of plumb, and window openings rack out of square.
That is the single most important fact about replacing a window or door in this city, and almost nobody puts it in a quote.
A window measured off the old frame will be wrong if the opening has shifted, so Norden Seal measures the rough opening in three places and checks it for square before ordering. A door that sticks in July and swings free in October is usually not a bad door; it is a frame following the soil, and replacing the slab alone does not fix it. Full-frame replacement is more common in Regina than in cities on stable ground, and a contractor who quotes retrofit sight-unseen is guessing.
The second load is open-prairie wind. With no terrain to break it, wind drives rain and snow horizontally against a wall, and it finds any seal that works by friction rather than by pressure. This is why casement windows, where the sash pulls tight against the frame as the handle locks, outperform sliders here. A slider seals by brushing past a weatherstrip, and a weatherstrip in a frame that has shifted with the soil is a gap waiting to happen.
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