I had decided to work with a local glass shop. They are close, not corporate at all and, I am beginning to learn, totally incompetent (see below). My first door was ordered on March 15. I bought glass right away.
Here is the comedy of errors in order:
1. Made 3, not 5 pieces
2. Made two more, broke one
3. Replaced that one, but put the wrong color spacer in it.
4. Replaced that one, but put a big ugly tempered logo on it.
5. One of the pieces from step 1 had glue between the panes and had to be rebuilt
6. Today I pick up the 2 replacements, wrong thickness. Now that I’m looking at the thickness, I realize 2 others are the wrong thickness.
So two months, 9 pieces of insulated glass built, countless phone calls and trips to the shop and I still have 4 bad pieces and only one good one. And that’s just one door. Four other doors are being held up by 10 pieces of glass that I had to return. They’ve been telling me tomorrow since Thursday.
If the mill hadn’t been a similar (actually worse) comedy of errors, I might have noticed earlier.
I tried to go to another glass shop. A big corporate shop. They cost more and the materials suck. The reeded glass there is a joke. I wouldn’t have known the difference, but the glass from the little glass shop of horrors is gorgeous.
Lots of people are spontaneously telling me not to give up. Hmm.
Here is one cool thing that happened in the last week. I found a shop to build name plates for the doors.

We banged one up attaching it to a two-by-four to test out different nails and screws. I’m looking at the difference between engraved or printed serial numbers.
The rectangle at the top will have an image of the door and the wide one will have the date and customer name.
I’m printing the first batch with black serial numbers. The numbers are raised and have a little texture to them.
So which do you like, printed black serial number or engraved?
Editied to Add: I tried another glass shop, and it sucked much more than the Little Glass Shop of Horrors. Everybody sends their IG glass orders to the same place. So it’s not the problem, but how you deal with the problem, and LGSoH has been not half bad.