In 2015 we remodeled a number of rooms in our home and have been enjoying the results in the four years since. I had no idea that tempered glass – used in both bathrooms – had a party trick reminiscent of spontaneous combustion, but I’m now wiser. And thankfully unhurt by the experience. You can compare the original bathroom look here, and the other bathroom’s glass looks like this. Safety glass was a term I thought I understood – in an “I know what that’s for” sort of way, versus really having a clue how it was made, what its risks vs. benefits were or anything else specific. Silly human! If you want to read a very brief overview, see what the Glass Doctor has to say.

The old bathroom had framed glass shower doors. I’ve had those before and never thought anything about them other than defocusing my eyes so as not to see that they could probably use a clean – certainly didn’t view them as a potential safety issue. Just before Thanksgiving, in the middle of the day, there was a horrendous noise that I thought was a large tree branch falling from the woods behind us onto the roof – very loud, sharp, and sudden, and other than “upstairs”, no real clue as to where. It had been a little windy and wet, but not one of those autumn/winter storms with high winds that routinely bring trees down in Western Washington.

All three of us rushed upstairs (both kids were home at the time) to investigate. I went to the bonus room, which was fine, and Brandon checked his room and the hall bathroom – also fine. Kerri called us into the master bathroom where the good news was that the roof was intact. The unexpected sight – plus the fact that none of us wear shoes in the house – stopped us in our tracks a few steps into the bathroom. It was hard to take in just what had happened – that a glass door that had been unscratched, undamaged, truly uneventful in its four-year existence, was now in hundreds (or thousands) of pieces seemingly everywhere in the room. No one had been in the bathroom since my morning shower and this mind-boggling destruction had occurred with no one anywhere near (which is good, but it still is hard to grasp when you think of people or objects impacting other people or objects to cause damage).

There was also the rather lovely triangle of temporarily upright fragmented glass that was still hanging on to a couple of the hinges. it looked like the shower-door equivalent of the cartoon character who runs off a cliff but hasn’t looked down yet to realize there’s nothing underneath. I took some cell phone photos, stepping carefully around the glass pieces and then ordered the others out while I sent email to the remodeling company to ask for help figuring out what to do. While waiting for their reply, I grabbed camera and tripod to get some higher-quality images, and while doing that, the hanging triangle of mosaic glass fell into the heap of pieces on the shower floor.

The remodeling company gave the all clear to clean up the mess – I had wondered if they needed to see it to try and assess how this happened – which then required some thought as to how I might do that. I had never done a clean-up job like this before. In addition to a broom and dustpan, I brought one of our snow shovels which looked like a useful tool for scooping piles of glass corralled in the shower. It was, but the glass is so heavy, a dustpan was more manageable in terms of weight.

Glass had been blasted with such force it was in parts of the bathroom with no line of sight to the shower – in our clothes closet far from the opening to the room, as but one example. I imagine all sorts of ricochet moves as the glass bounced off one thing and another to find its way everywhere in the room. It took multiple passes to get all the glass – you’d think you were finished, turn around, and glass would be glinting at you, from a place you were certain you’d just vacuumed.

The bathmat (the red toweling in the pictures) and my flannel (washcloth) ended up in the bags with the glass pieces. I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever be sure I had removed all the glass and didn’t want them in the washing machine to spread glass elsewhere. The holes in the bathmat were not that big, but even with my toughened soles, I didn’t want cut feet from finding that one last sharp piece of glass in the mat.

Posting pictures on social media (Jeffrey shared my Facebook post to his many Twitter followers) we found that exploding tempered glass isn’t quite as rare as the “once in a blue moon” I’d at first thought. A school friend had a hotel’s glass shower door “explode” – with her in the shower – earlier this year. Another had a glass sink “explode”. There were several “that happened to me” comments on Jeffrey’s Tweet, and also to my school friend, who had shared my Faccebook post. In the “small world” category someone I don’t know who knows my school friend thought there was something fishy when they saw the same picture in her post and Jeffrey’s Tweet. My friend said that the Tweet was from my husband, eliciting “Really?” as a response. “Really” we both replied!

Here are some links to blogs or articles on the subject of “exploding” tempered glass. Blog, article, construction company article (there’s an amusing comment saying one reader believes birds are dropping rocks on their overhead glass panels, breaking them – at least I can rule that out). The Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a Safety Alert and updated their standards in 2016 as a result of reports similar to ours. They encourage reporting safety incidents, but I don’t have much of the product information they are looking for (such as who manufactured the glass and when) so I’m not sure I can meet their criteria.

All this begs the question of what to do next. There’s the lightning won’t strike the same person twice school of thought – a variation on “fingers crossed” but it’s true this is a low probability event. I am of the opinion that there’s no point in doing something about the shower door without the other pieces of tempered glass (four in the master bath and three in the other). Laminated glass sounded (to me) like a good option because of the layer of plastic between the two pieces of glass to hold it together should it ever break.

We had used laminated glass once before when replacing the “skywall” window in the kitchen – because the window company said it was required given the size of an overhead piece of glass. It cost more, but at the time I was thinking only of the unbroken view and meeting code so there’d be no hiccups whenever we sell the house.

The glass company thinks laminated glass is a bad idea for the shower (not sure I understand their reasons, but they’re the glass company and I’m just the person trying to avoid being showered with glass bits) and to use a safety film applied to tempered glass. The glass company recommended a local contractor they’ve worked with which does safety, solar and artistic films for both commercial and residential use – but not showers. The safety film company thinks with the frameless glass it’d be a waste of time and money to apply to the shower panels – wouldn’t hold the glass together n case of breakage – and don’t recommend we do that.

So for the interim, my plan is to replace the shower door with a new tempered glass door and try to figure out a good long-term solution for all the glass. We will at least have two working showers in the house while we do the thinking and that beats moving out or sponge baths.

Right after the breakage, I was in favor of ditching modern living for mud huts with wood doors! I mentioned that when thanking the person at the safety film company for their forthright assessment, and received a reply that if I decided to go that route, he recommended the Greek Islands! Call that a plan.