The Door That Could Not Go Up the Stairs at Ocean Grove

A large double glazed door on the first floor of a home at Ocean Grove needed replacing. The glass was the easy part. Getting it to the opening was the job.

The extension had been built the way most extensions are. The frames went in during construction, while the scaffold was still standing and the first floor was open to the weather. At that point a big unit is simply lifted straight in off the scaffold. Nobody is thinking about what happens the day it has to come back out.

The staircase

The house is finished now, and the only route to the first floor is this staircase. It turns through three different angles on the way up, under a raked ceiling, with walls close on both sides.

The door is 2300 by 1200, and with the framework it comes in around 85 kilograms. A double glazed unit that size is rigid, it cannot be flexed around a corner, and it cannot be stood on its edge and walked up a turn. There is no combination of angles that gets it up those stairs, and no number of extra bodies changes that. It either goes in from outside, or it does not go in.

First job for the truck crane

We had just finished setting up our truck crane, and this was its first job out.

The old unit came out of the frame, was picked up off the balcony with a vacuum lifting grab on the crane, and was lowered to the ground. The frame was reglazed on the truck at ground level, which is far safer and far more controlled than trying to do that work on a balcony, and then the whole thing went back up the same way.

The vacuum grab is what makes this possible. It holds the panel by suction on the face of the glass, so there is nothing clamped to the edges and nothing relying on straps around a unit that does not like point loads. The lift is steady, the panel stays flat, and the crew on the balcony are guiding it rather than carrying it.

Two lifts, no stairs, no damage to a finished house, and no crew of six trying to wrestle 85 kilograms around three turns in a stairwell.

Back in the channel

Once it was on the balcony the rest was ordinary glazing. The unit went back into the channel, was packed and set square, and checked for operation.

Last on were the visual indicators, the decals you see on large glass doors and panels. They are not decoration. A full height panel of clear glass with a clean view through it can be mistaken for an open doorway, and the standard requires a marking that makes the glass visible to anyone walking towards it. On a door this size, with a deck and a view on the other side, it matters.

What this means if you are building or renovating

If you are putting large glass into an upper floor while the scaffold is up, it is worth asking one question before the frames go in: how would this panel come back out?

Not because it will break, but because eventually something does. A stone off a mower, a failed seal in a double glazed unit, a spontaneous break, or a renovation ten years later. If the only access route is a staircase that the panel cannot physically travel, the answer is a crane, and that is a cost nobody budgeted for at the time.

It is not a reason to build differently. It is a reason to know, so there is no surprise on the day.

If you have glass that cannot be carried in

Send us a photo of the opening, a photo of the way in, and your suburb. The access photo matters as much as the glass photo, because it decides whether the job is two people and a trolley or a crane and a lift plan.

We own our lifting gear rather than hiring it, so there is no waiting on a crane contractor's calendar and no second supplier to coordinate. There is more on the machines we run on our equipment page, more on unit make ups on our glass types page, and another crane job written up on a 650 kilogram panel at Connewarre.