Second-hand Glass

Cheaper than first-hand

Molly and I had a problem.

We wanted a light-filled cabin and—leaning into our temperate coastal California climate—to have large doors that could spill the small indoor footprint onto an outdoor deck. The issue was cost. Glass is expensive. And in our case, for our desires, prohibitively so.

When we started pricing large glass doors that could effectively open an entire wall, we realized pretty quickly it wasn’t going to happen. Roll-up doors and all of the folding and sliding partitions made by La Cantina, Nanawall, etc, were about $10-15k. (This was in 2017. Prices are much higher now.)

So we decided to look to the salvaged market.

This approach fit our project well, as we had no firm timeline and no exact design. Hell, we weren’t even sure if we’d be building a cabin any time soon. But, we’d kicked around a bunch of designs, and had a sense of size, and what a cabin on our site could look like.

In late 2017 we came across one of those big glass doors on Craigslist made by Panoramic Doors. Its three panels pivoted and slid/ stacked to one side so that the ten-foot bay fully opened up (unlike a sliding glass door that would only half open). It was brand new; never installed because the wrong size was ordered. It would have cost about $10k. We bought it for $3k, reasoning that we could probably design a cabin around it. Or, worst case, sell it.

The purchase spurred us to rent a cheap storage unit by the airport for a handful of months, in order to amass more salvaged materials, to sort out what could and could not work, as we tip-toed our way into cabin commitment. We set up Craigslist alerts and made a lot of trips to local building salvage supply stores. (In our case, Habitat for Humanity Restore, Urban Ore, and Building Resources, mostly.)

These trips were fun. Inspiring. But, also their own headache. Almost too many choices.

Working from salvaged glass is constraining. The size of the window, whether it opens (and what direction it opens), the quality, the materials… are all considerations. There are many windows that could maybe work, but the abundance of options is as much daunting as it is empowering. Plus, let’s not forget the extra effort (or waterproofing) a salvaged window or door may require during installation.

Point being, it’s not as straightforward as buying new.

So, Molly and I would take a trip Urban Ore, looking for a specific batch of windows… really just a rough idea of what they could be. And if we found some potential winners we’d go out to the parking lot and sit on the laptop and mock them up into the Sketchup model of the cabin. Mull them over. Think about how these choices could fit into, or newly inform, the design. And what sort of extra work might be required to make use of them.

Sometimes we’d go home with a window. Usually we didn’t. A lot of back and forth.

Thankfully, locking in a window would refine the scope of subsequent hunts. But of course, now we’re searching for an even more specific window or door and finding less usable options.

Our big win was a set of four Andersen windows Series 400 casement windows. Wood trim interior. Exterior cladding was a little wrong, but we spray-painted it and it worked out fine. They were in good shape, having never been installed, and opened in ways we could work with. These locked in the design of the entire east wall.

Once we’d acquired those and everything along the south wall (which included the Panoramic Door) we only had the west wall remaining.

By this point, our desires were getting pretty specific as the cabin design was really taking shape. We’d let the second-hand market shape things to a point, but didn’t want to be fully restricted (in time and design) by what was available in the scrap yard. So we opted to fill out that wall with new windows and a small sliding glass door, albeit from a budget line.

For the wood-trimmed interior, aluminum-clad exterior windows, and the small sliding glass door of the west wall, we paid $4500. All told our cabin’s 11 windows and 2 doors totaled about $8200. New they would have been close to $20k.

There are other cheaper ways to do new doors and windows. Most obviously, you don’t have to set your sights on an expensive glass wall like we did. And, if you buy off-the-shelf vinyl windows from your local big box store, they can be reasonably priced. So if those aesthetic and size constraints work for your project, rad.

The biggest takeaway here, I think, is not that the cheapest way to build is with second-hand glass. It’s just that you can get so much more if you’re willing to go through the trouble of working with used products.

Glass is expensive. Big nice glass framed in premium materials is VERY expensive. But, there is a way to do it on the cheap (ish).