Master Bathroom Skylight

This page describes one of the phases of the multi-year Master Bathroom Remodeling Project.

There is a very nice skylight in our master bathroom that lets in a lot of light. Similar to what Frank Lloyd Wright would do in his designs (windows and skylights), I wanted to put a piece of leaded stained glass over it. Frank Lloyd Wright called these "light screens" because though they were mostly transparent and let much of the light in. However, the extra design that the lead and stained glass provided made it seem much more of a visual barrier than it actually was. It is a kind of a perceptual trick.

I had taken a stained glass class, so I knew I could make something if I was willing to invest the time and money for the equipment, but I did not have the time. I decided to explore contracting out the work, just to get a ballpark idea on what it might cost for a custom made piece of stained glass. After some research, I located a few places to solicit bids for and created this web page: Bathroom Skylight Designs Page. That web page defines my requirements and the details to help them give me a quote. There are three candidate designs of varying complexity since I knew that would be a factor in the price.

The lower end of the initial 3 quotes I received were $2,000, and they were all a bit fuzzy and conditional. Other quotes that I viewed as probably more realistic were in the $2,500 and up range, though they too came with some caveats. This may be a reasonable price given the costs of materials, equipment and labor, but it was not a price I could justify paying, especially since I suspected the final price was going to be higher. I solicited one more smaller place and they gave me a quote that was half of these prices. This put it in the range that I decided to move forward. Unfortunately, after a few meetings and months, this deal fell through due to some personal reasons the contactor did not elaborate on. Although this was a bit disappointing, the vendor was earnest, apologetic and returned our deposit, so no real harm was done.

With the Bathroom Remodeling Project nearing the end, the big hole in the ceiling and lack of a plan had me thinking. The skylight edges were rough and needed some sort of trim, but the trim would be integral in the support of the glass I wanted to add so I could not design that without a clearer plan for the skylight. Thus, I had to do something because I did not want to leave the unsightly, unfinished skylight edges until I had the time to get to make the stained glass.

I decided that, if cheap enough, I could put some printed form of the stained glass design on a piece of glass. This would help to really see what it might look like and serve as a placeholder until I had the time to make the real stained glass myself.

I started with the idea of using printed rice paper. This would be somewhat of a Japanese-style look, which would be consistent with the overall bathroom design. Being translucent, it would let a lot of the light in. Printing something on rice paper seems to be a niche market though, but I found a place on-line and ordered the 20'' x 40'' sheet I needed. The vendor I used seems to cater to surfers: I think printed rice paper is used for getting designs onto a surfboard.

An important thing to be aware of when ordering anything printed is that colors are very, very tricky. What you see on a computer screen and what gets printed out can be very different things. Colors can vary wildly just going from one computer screen to another. Until you have the printout in hand, you really have no idea how the colors you picked on your computer screen will translate. Thus, you have to invest in a sample to really know what it will be like.

When the printout arrived, it was pretty close to what I hoped. However, I did not appreciate how thin and fragile rice paper is. I now had this nice, but very fragile rice paper print and did not know what to do with it.

An adhesive decal would seem to be an obvious next choice, and in fact would seem more obvious than rice paper. Conceptually I was against a decal since I expected it would look like a very cheap imitation, but now decided to give it a try. Unlike printed rice paper, there are plenty of on-line sites that will print custom decals.

Since I was mostly guessing about how the colors might look, at the last minute, before uploading to the vendor's web site, I made all the colors slightly transparent. I hoped this would help it look more like stained glass letting more light through. However, this would be a bit of a miscalculation.

When the decal arrived, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality. The backing paper meant I would not know for sure how it would look until I peeled that off and stuck it on a piece of glass. Now all I needed was a piece of glass.

All I needed now was a 20.5'' x 40.5'' piece of glass. Seems a pretty simple item to find and should be relatively cheap. I've been to Home Depot many times to get pieces of glass and they would even cut it to a custom size for you. However, having taken the stained glass class, we now owned a nice glass cutter and glass cutting tools, so I could do the cutting myself which I preferred so I did not have to rely on some hurried store assistant's idea of making precise cuts.

Home Dissapointment

Off to Home Depot I went and came back empty handed. They no longer had the glass setup they used to where they had sheets of glass and an area to cut it. instead, they just had some pre-cut sizes you could choose from. Unfortunately, the largest size they had was a bit too small for my needs. They did have a piece of plexiglass that was big enough, but there were three problems with plexiglass:

plastic scratches easily, and many of the ones in the store were already scratched;
plastic bends more easily, which is especially worrisome due to gravity and its horizontal installation; and
it was way more expensive than I thought it woud be.

Despite all this, I was considering this heavily for a long time in the store. Before making a decision, I decided to head over to Lowe's to see what they had, but they did not have glass large enough nor plexiglass large enough. I aborted this mission and went home to rethink my choices.

I started to research other stores, specifically glass stores that do windows. Surely they have tons of glass and cutting a piece would be trivial for them. The first glass stored I called opened with the question, "Do you have insurance?" and I immediately knew this was going to be trouble. I just wanted a simple piece of glass, I did not need to be involved in their insurance scams and overpricing schemes. They also asked me if this was an emergency, and because I said no, they said they could not help me over the phone and I would have to come into their store. Their store hours were only on weekdays with limited hours and I was not taking time off work for this.

Through all of this, I was learning that the going rate for a piece of glass the size I needed was in the $100 to $120 range. This was about 4 or 5 times as much as I expected and that would start to call into question the original intent of this being a cheap placeholder for the stained glass. The plexiglass solution was $75 and that was way too much for all of the inferior qualities it offered. At this point I was just not willing to pay $100 for a simple, small piece of glass.

Now I started thinking of more creative alternatives. This was not a very big piece of glass, certainly much smaller than a lot of windows, so I wondered what sorts of places might have used or broken windows. Where do replaced windows go to die? Even a larger broken window might still have an undamaged area big enough for me to cut out the piece I needed. I even thought about large picture frame glass, but those are generally too thin for using them horizontally (I needed something at least 3/16'' thick, and preferrably 1/4'').

I was certain that there must be a vast trove of unwanted panes of glass somewhere out there in the world. My wife started making some trips to Goodwill and other used home products type places to keep a lookout for cheap pieces of glass.

Tempered glass is something I was thinking about, both for the extra strength and the extra safety it would provide for the overhead skylight application. However, tempered glass is a lot more expensive that regular (annealed) glass so I did not consider it for too long. I thought about what would happen if a small meteorite came crashing through the skylight. Weighing the likelihood of meteor strikes versus the added cost tempered my craving for the added safety factor. I also vaguely knew that tempered glass could not be cut like regular glass, though I would greatly underestimate what this really meant.

One day, my wife called me about a large piece of glass she found at one of these used home goods places. I asked her if it was tempered, but she did not know how to tell (nor did I really), but it was big enough. I asked her how much it was and since it was only $10, I decided she should buy it and we would give it a try.

On arriving home, this was a much bigger (and heavier) piece of glass than I expected. It was part of a door so it had a metal bracket affixed to one edge and some holes where the handle used to be on the other edge. It has the green-ish hue that made me think it might be tempered, but before worriying about how I would cut that, I wanted to first take the metal bracket off.

I began my trying to pry the bracket off, but that was not working so well. The bracket seemed to be glued on, so my next thought was to get a rubber mallet and a punch and try to knock it off side ways. I took a couple tentative, exploratory hits of the hammer and punch, but there was no movement of the bracket. I was very focused on the glass and bracket junction to make sure I did not accidentally hit the glass and only put stress on the metal bracket. One more swift, harder blow from the hammer and I instantly knew that the glass had cracked. When I turned my focus away from the immediate area I was concentrating on to assess how much of the glass I had damaged, I found there was no more glass left anywhere.

Tempered glass does not shatter like annealed glass. With tempered glass it is an all encompassing, catastrophic event. The way tempered glass is made, it leave a lot of internal stress built up into the glass so once it gives, it propagates to the entire sheet. Interestingly, I read that this propagation happens at the speed of sound.

Shattered Glass Fragments

What we were now staring at in our garage was thousands of tiny pieces of glass, many of which lie on the work table and many of which had jettisoned all over the garage. After the extensive cleanup operation, and even though I no longer needed to know how, I went to research how to cut tempered glass. The answer is: "You don't." It is flat out not possible to cut tempered glass. The one article I read whose title was "How to Cut Tempered Glass" had instructions that began with "First, untemper the glass." and whose last step was "Re-temper the Glass". Not helpful when the process of tempering requires an industrial setup of specialized equipment.

Real Glass Shop

I now gave into the $100 price tag that a real glass solution required. I did finally find a glass store that was open on Saturday's and treated this as the straightforward matter it should have been. "Yes, we can cut you a custom piece of glass and would 1 hour be soon enough?" Perfect. Somewhat embarassingly, this is a place I drive by twice a day going to and from work. It was so obvious that it was not obvious. This should have been my first choice and I would have avoided all the nonesense described above. The place, Ace Discount Glass, used to be a car junk yard with a glass business on the side. They got rid of the junk yard some years back but the glass business remains. I guess I still mentally put this into the junk yard bucket, even though I did have them repair a window in my house once. In retrospect, I really overcomplicated this glass buying problem.

And the big bonus was that this glass sheet was only $65, while all the other quotes I got were in the $100 range.

Glass with Pale Version Decal

Putting the decal on the glass was relatively straightforward and it looked nicer than I expected a decal would. After cleaning the glass, and taking the backing sheet off the decal, you have to wet both surfaces with very slightly soapy water and then lay it on. Like wallpaper or any other decal, you then have to work from the center outwards to remove the air bubbles. The decal was deliberately just a shade bigger than the glass, so after drying I used an Exacto knife to trim the excess of the decal.

Preparation for Popcorn Scraping

Before doing a test installation, we had to remove the remaining popcorn texture from the skylight chute. This was surprisingly difficult given the height and geometry of the skylight (cramped), but dealing with the heat was the more difficult part. I know heat rises, so expected it to be warmer in the skylight chute, but I had no idea just how hot it got. It was effectively the same temperature as up in our attic. After one round of dealing with the heat, I made sure to do subsequent work earlier in the day.

Skylight with Pale Version Installed

Skylight before Installation

I now had to work out exactly how to support the glass and how the trim would look. Key design criteria as always was "no visible screws". Once I settled on the the joining, sizing and design, I cut and drilled the glass support pieces so I could position them, screw them in and get a first look at how this all came together.

Skylight Frame Pieces During Sanding

Skylight Frame Pieces

The skylight trim pieces were mostly straightforward being much like a picture frame. The width of the frame and the rounding of the edges were done to be compatible with the trim used around the mirror for the Sink Recess phase of the remodeling project. I used biscuit joints on the ends, not so much for strength, but to get a more precise alignment at the edges.

Ladder in Skylight

View Upward of Skylight before Painting

While waiting the required multiple days for the coats of polyurethane it was time to give a couple of coats of paint to the skylight chute area since it was pretty rough looking after the popcorn removal.

After applying the decal and the test installation, the colors of the decal started to bother me. My last minute change of the decal to add more transparency was not for the better as the colors just looked washed out. Though you can get transparent areas printed as this decal had, any area that was not transparent, no matter how light or dark the color, would be mostly opaque. There was some transfer of light from the back to the visible side, but this was not dependent on the lightness or darkness of the color. Thus, all my transparency color change did was to result in paler colors.

Should I change the colors back and order a new decal? My "cheap placeholder" project was starting to become not so cheap. After some internal back and forth, I decided to spend the money to reprint the decal with more vibrant colors. I also used the opportunity to improve the design somewhat. The center of the design was pedestrian, and there was a design element from the original Frank Lloyd Wright work that we liked but that did not make it into the initial design. This was the opporuntity to fix both those problems and it did lead to a better result.

This placeholder skylight glass would be in place for 5 years and eventually was replaced with real stained glass. See the Stained Glass Skylight Page.