Broken, fogged or cracked glass in an entry door, sidelight or patio door is one of the most common calls we take across metro Atlanta — and one of the most commonly over-quoted. The usual advice from a door company is a new door. In most cases the door is fine and only the glass needs to come out.
Repairing the glass without replacing the door
Almost every residential door built since the 1970s holds its glass in a removable insert. The glass sits in a frame that is screwed or clipped into the door slab, and that frame comes out. That means a fogged decorative insert in a fiberglass entry door, a cracked pane in a wood french door, or a failed sidelight can usually be repaired in place in a single visit, at a fraction of the cost of a new door and without touching the jamb, the threshold, the hinges or the lockset.
Where the glass is glazed directly into a wood door — common on older Atlanta homes and on true divided-light french doors — we re-glaze it the traditional way: strip the old putty and points, clean the rabbet, bed the new glass and re-putty. It is slower and it lasts decades.
The four problems we see most
Fogging between the panes. The seal on an insulated door glass unit has failed and moisture is trapped inside. Nothing you can do from either side will clear it. The unit is replaced; the door stays.
Cracks from movement, not impact. On a south- or west-facing Atlanta door, the temperature difference across the glass on an August afternoon is enough to start a stress crack from an edge, with nothing having hit it. These almost always mean the unit was bedded too tightly, and re-bedding the replacement matters as much as the glass itself.
Blown seals on sliding patio doors. Large units, heavy, and usually tempered. They are replaceable, but they must be tempered to code and templated precisely.
Rot around the glass opening. On a wood door the water that gets past a failed seal ends up in the stile below the glass. This is where a door genuinely can reach the end of its life — and where catching it early is the difference between a repair and a replacement.
Decorative, leaded and obscure glass
Atlanta housing stock is full of decorative entry glass, from 1920s leaded panels in Marietta and Decatur bungalows to the caming-and-bevel inserts fitted across suburban subdivisions in the 1990s. Leaded and stained panels can be re-leaded and re-soldered rather than discarded, and an original panel is almost always worth saving. Where a modern decorative insert has fogged, the pattern is usually still in production or closely matchable.
Obscure and privacy glass — rain, glue chip, satin, reeded — is matched to the existing pattern rather than substituted, so a repaired sidelight does not sit next to an unrepaired one looking wrong.
Safety glazing, and why it is not optional
Glass in and beside a door is required to be safety glazing: tempered or laminated, with a permanent stamp in the corner. If a previous repair put annealed glass into a door, that is both a code violation and a genuine hazard. Everything we install in a door opening is code-compliant safety glass, and we will tell you if we find something that is not.
What it costs, roughly
A single fogged insulated insert in a standard entry door is the least expensive job we do. A large tempered patio slider, a custom-sized sidelight or a re-leaded decorative panel costs more, driven almost entirely by the glass itself rather than the labour. We quote from a photograph and the measurements in most cases, so you are not paying for a visit to find out.
Where we work
From our shop in Marietta we cover Cobb, north Fulton, Cherokee and east into DeKalb — Roswell, Alpharetta, Kennesaw, Smyrna, Sandy Springs, Woodstock, Dunwoody, Buckhead and Decatur among them.
