Why a Frameless Door Needs the Opening Templated First

Every so often we get a call from a homeowner who ordered glass online, or through a contractor working off rough plans, and the panels showed up not fitting the opening. It's an expensive mistake, because unlike a framed door where the metal frame can absorb an inch or two of slack, frameless glass is cut once, to a specific set of measurements, and it either fits or it doesn't. There's no adjusting a piece of tempered glass after the fact. This is why templating exists as its own step, separate from taking a tape measure to the opening.

What templating actually is

Templating means measuring the finished opening after the tile, the pan or curb, and the walls are fully in place, using a story pole or a physical template rather than a single tape-measure reading. A shower opening is almost never a perfect rectangle. Walls settle out of plumb over years, tile setters build in small variations from top to bottom, and a pan or curb can sit slightly out of level. A story pole measurement captures the opening's width and height at several points, top, middle, and bottom, so the glass order accounts for whatever variation actually exists, instead of assuming the opening is the same size everywhere.

Why the order matters: tile first, then glass

This is the part that catches people off guard when they're planning a bathroom remodel on their own timeline. The tile work has to be finished, and the pan or curb has to be set, before the frameless glass can be accurately measured. If someone tries to order the glass early to save a few weeks, or measures off the framing before the tile goes up, the finished opening almost never matches the paper measurement. Tile adds thickness. Grout lines shift things by a fraction of an inch in places. None of that shows up until the tile is actually on the wall.

What goes wrong when this step gets skipped

The most common result is a gap: the glass is slightly too small for the opening in one spot, which either shows as an uneven reveal along the wall or forces the installer to add filler strips that undercut the whole point of going frameless in the first place. The opposite problem, glass ordered too large, is worse, because oversized tempered glass generally can't be trimmed on site and the panel has to be scrapped and reordered. Either way, the homeowner ends up paying twice, once for the wrong glass and once for the reorder, and waiting weeks longer than they expected for a shower they can actually use.

How we handle it

On every frameless job, we template the opening ourselves after the tile and pan are finished, using our own measurements rather than plans or estimates from earlier in the renovation. That's also why we ask to see the finished shower in person, not just photos, before we can give a firm order date. It adds a short wait between the tile being done and the glass arriving, but it's the difference between a door that sits flush and even on install day and one that needs correcting afterward. If you're mid-renovation and planning for a frameless enclosure, the simplest thing to do is call us once your tile is set, and we'll come out and template it properly before anything gets ordered. You can see the finished result of that process across the projects in our gallery, or read more about the frameless option itself on our shower doors page.

What this means for your timeline

If you're coordinating a full bathroom remodel with a general contractor, it helps to flag early on that the glass enclosure is one of the last things to happen, not one of the first. A contractor working through a punch list may assume the shower door can be ordered alongside cabinets and fixtures to save time, but for frameless glass specifically, that assumption is exactly what leads to a mismatched order. Building a short window into the schedule between tile completion and a final template visit avoids the far longer delay of a reorder later, and it's a conversation worth having with your contractor before tile day, not after.