Shade sails · MerrylandsShade over the play yard and the back step.

Shade in Merrylands

Shade for a Cumberland block

Merrylands sits in the middle of Cumberland. Childcare centres, community halls and places of worship are spread right through it, and an unshaded yard in February gets hot early. The older brick houses run to deep blocks with the yard stretching out long behind them. Newer duplexes come with a paved courtyard and no lawn at all, hard against a colorbond fence and facing west.

We take the dimensions, work out what the corners can be fixed to, and draw the structure over a photograph of your own place, so you're looking at your fence, your roofline and your paving with the shade already on them. The measure and the blueprint are free, and the quote arrives in writing. Our instant estimate works off your own measurements if you want a figure first.

Play-yard canopies and sail clusters for childcare centres and schools sit on our education page, and the bigger covered outdoor learning areas have a COLA page of their own. Waterproof PVC suits a courtyard or an alfresco slab that has to stay usable in the rain. Plain shade cloth over a patio, a pool or a carport is residential work. PVC doesn't breathe the way shade cloth does, so a PVC sail needs more fall built into it to shed water.

A brick wall and a fibro one don't take a fixing the same way, and what sits behind the render decides whether a bracket will do at all. Where the house won't carry the load, the sail goes on posts standing clear of it. The footing under each post carries the bulk of the load, holding against the pull of the fabric as much as its weight, and clay ground wants a different hole from sand. Every sail we make is engineered to the NSW wind codes, with certification available if you want it.

West-facing courtyards need the most thought. The sun comes in low and sideways through the afternoon, so a sail sitting flat overhead does very little once the light drops below the fence line. The cover has to come down on the western side to catch it, which usually means one low corner and more fall across the sail. Darker cloth cuts more light than a pale one, so colour matters more on the western side than it does straight overhead.

Almost never. Most backyard sails sit inside the exempt development rules in NSW, so there's nothing to lodge and nothing to wait for. Childcare and community sites are where that changes. The full picture is here.

We hold NSW builder licence 294924C, and we're 40-odd years and more than 3,000 jobs into this trade. Most of that shows up years after the install rather than on the day, when a sail wants re-tensioning after a run of hard summers and somebody has to remember how it was cut. We also re-tension, repair and re-skin sails other people built, so a tired sail on a house you've just bought is worth a look before you write it off.

Merrylands is about 10 minutes from our Rydalmere factory, where every sail we install is measured, cut, welded and finished.

We also cover Granville, Guildford, Holroyd, Westmead and South Wentworthville.