Peak Season Starts Now: What Still Fits in the Calendar

Hurricane season officially opens on 1 June, but anyone who has lived in Southwest Florida for more than a couple of years knows the calendar that actually matters starts about now. August through October is when this region gets hit. Charley was 13 August. Irma was 10 September. Ian was 28 September. Milton was October.

So this is the honest conversation about timing, written in the middle of it rather than in February when it is easy to be relaxed about.

The thing that takes the time is not the install

People assume the hold-up is manufacturing or crew availability. Usually it is neither. For most homes the physical installation is a day, sometimes two. What sits in front of that is:

• The measure. Openings get measured properly, once, by someone who is going to be responsible for the result. This is not a phone estimate.
• Manufacturing. Every screen is built to your opening. There is no warehouse of pre-made 22-foot screens.
• Permit review. The variable, and the one nobody controls. It depends on your jurisdiction and on how busy that office is when your application lands.
• Architectural review, if you are in a deed-restricted community. Often the longest single step, and the one homeowners forget entirely.

Where you permit changes the timeline

Southwest Florida is not one permitting jurisdiction, and which office reviews your job depends on your address, not your mailing city. A few that catch people out:

• Most addresses people call “Naples” are actually unincorporated Collier County, not the City of Naples. Different office. More on Naples.
• Whiskey Creek, Iona and much of Gateway are unincorporated Lee County, not the City of Fort Myers. More on Fort Myers.
• The Village of Estero has run its own permitting since it incorporated in 2014. More on Estero.
• Sanibel and Fort Myers Beach each run their own building departments, with flood and elevation requirements layered on top. Sanibel · Fort Myers Beach.

We work all of them, and permitting is handled for you rather than handed to you as a packet. But no contractor can promise a review time, and anyone who does is telling you what you want to hear.

If you have left it late

Say it is late August and you have nothing on your openings. What is the sensible move?

Book the measure anyway. The worst outcome of starting now is that you are protected for the back half of this season and definitely protected for the next one. The worst outcome of waiting for the quiet season is that you spend another year exposed and then join the queue in spring alongside everyone else who had the same idea.

And in the meantime, do the free things. Clear the yard of anything that can fly. Know where your existing hardware is and whether it still works. If you have a motorized system already, run it — do not discover in a warning cone that a motor has been sitting unused for two years.

One thing that is not a timing problem

Your pool cage. A screen enclosure is not opening protection, it never was, and no amount of lead time changes that. If your plan for this season is that the cage will slow the wind down, that is not a plan. We wrote more about why in a separate post, but the short version is that when a cage fails, its aluminum frame becomes the debris that goes through the slider behind it.

Southwest Florida rewards people who deal with this in the calm part of the year and punishes people who deal with it in a warning cone. There is no clever way around that. The only useful response is to start earlier than feels necessary.