Wilson Glass

MISC INFO - FRAMELESS SHOWER DOORS AND GLASS TILES

Frameless Shower Doors and Glass Tiles
Glass tiles can add beauty and class to a shower surround or backsplash, but they can also add another level of difficulty when installing a frameless shower door or even a framed door on top of them.

Frameless shower doors and glass tiles. What is the problem?
More and more people are using glass tiles to accent their bathrooms. Glass tiles illuminate and shine and give a look that can't be recreated with porcelain or ceramic. While glass tiles are hard and beautiful, they are also brittle and can be hard to work with when installing enclosures. This article should explain the pros and cons of glass tile as well as give tips for installing frameless shower door enclosures on top of the glass tile.

Glass is brittle. When installing a frameless shower door or really any shower door there are several holes that need to be drilled into the walls for mechanical fasteners and hinges and any glass door hardware. When the walls are made of glass, the chance of a cracked tile goes up enormously. I would say the chance of a glass tile cracking during the installation of a shower door on top of them is about 90 percent or more. If there is no breakage during installation, one will probably crack soon after.

The tiles where the hinges or fasteners are located should be replaced with ceramic tiles.

We installed this one in Mill Valley.
You have to be very careful fastening hinges and brackets to keep glass tiles from cracking.

How to avoid cracking a tile while drilling for frameless shower door hardware. First off, if you are installing a frameless shower door for a customer, make sure that you talk to them about the troubles of working on glass tile and make sure that they know you are diving into a project that can(and probably will) run into some problems. If you let them know in advance of probable issues, they might not be as upset when you have to come to them about replacing a tile. If they are adamant that cracking a tile is unacceptable, then you may want to rethink if you need that job. I have heard several stories from customers that told me other shower installers refused to install over glass tiles and to be honest i'm not sure I blame them.

Let’s start with installing a shower door hinge on glass tile. Every step is critical from drilling the hole to inserting the anchor to tightening the screw. In my experience, the best way to limit the amount of glass cracking is to drill a slightly oversized hole in the glass by rotating the drill slightly ass you are drilling for the mounting screws. Then insert the plastic anchors as gently as possible and push the anchors just past the glass tile so that when the screw is installed the anchor won’t expand inside the glass hole. You can use a punch or even another anchor to help push the anchor past the glass tile. Then when you hold the glass door in place with the hinge on you can safely tighten the screw. I would also recommend against using an impact driver to tighten down screws over glass tiles as well as possible hand tightening the last few turn of screw. A sore wrist is a lot better than having to replace tiles and postpone a shower door installation as well as deal with upset customers.

Another option is trying to keep holes in a grout line. Drilling a hole in a grout line may reduce the change of breakage. If you look closely at the picture on the left, I planned to install all the hardware in grout lines with this shower. The hinge at the top is a wall mounted pivot which has 2 mounting screws that are vertical from each other which allows for both the screws to enter a grout line. It would be near impossible to stay in grout lines with a normal wall mounted hinge. The wall mounted pivots also help the door miss the window sill by putting the pivot of the door around 3 inches away from the wall so that when the door is open the door does not hit the sill.