DeLand Glass · DeLand, Orange City & west Volusia County, FL

A Broken Pane in DeLand — First Steps

Clear the room, photograph it, then read the bit about not letting anyone tear the sash apart in a hurry.

The first few minutes

People and pets out, then shoes on — the fragments that cut are the ones you cannot see on a wooden floor
Leave glass that is still standing in the frame alone. In an old sash the surviving pieces are often held by nothing more than dried putty
Photograph before you sweep: the room, the window, then close on the break
Cover the opening if weather is due, because water getting into an old sill causes more damage than the broken pane did
Ground floor or a door means it is a security problem as well as a weather one
If a shower panel came down as a heap of blunt cubes, that is tempered glass working correctly rather than failing

One thing specific to old windows

Whoever covers the opening should not be screwing plywood through an original sash or frame. It is quick, it is what gets done by default, and every fixing is a hole in a piece of timber that has lasted a century and may well be repaired rather than replaced.

There are gentler ways to close an opening temporarily — a panel fixed to the surrounding trim rather than the sash, or clear polycarbonate battened in place, which has the side benefit of leaving the room lit. Ask what is going to be fastened to what before anybody reaches for a drill. It is a thirty-second conversation and it is the difference between a repairable window and one with a row of holes in it.

Useful to have ready when you call

Which window, and roughly what the broken pane measures
Whether it is a single pane in a wood sash, or a modern unit with two panes and a gap
How old the house is, approximately
Whether the sash or the sill is damaged as well as the glass
Whether other panes in the same window are loose or the putty is missing
Whether the address is in or near a historic district, if you know

While somebody is already there

A callout has a fixed cost regardless of how much glass gets replaced, so it is worth walking round with them while they are on site. If three other sashes in the same room have crumbling putty, having them done in the same visit is cheaper than three separate visits over the next two years — and they are going to need doing.

It is also a free second opinion on the question this site keeps returning to: ask them, while they are holding the sash, whether the rest of the windows are repairable. Someone who has just done the work has no particular reason to sell you anything, and their answer tends to be more useful than a quote.

Where old glass and the safety rule meet

Glass in doors, storm doors, sliding patio doors and shower or bathtub enclosures falls under a federal standard, 16 CFR Part 1201, because those are the panes somebody can walk into. Compliant glazing is marked permanently — etched, sandblasted, hot-stamped, or tagged in a way that destroys itself if picked at.

An old DeLand house predates all of it, and that produces a genuine tension worth naming. The wavy, slightly imperfect glass in an original sash is part of why the house looks the way it does; nobody sensible rips it out on principle, and the standard is not retroactive. A fixed window at waist height that nobody walks into is simply old glass, and old glass is fine.

Where it stops being an academic point is at doors. A single-pane door light, a glazed porch door, an original French door onto the yard — those are openings people walk into, and they are the ones worth thinking about honestly. There are ways to reconcile the two, and the conversation to have with a glazier is what the options are for that specific door, not whether the whole house needs modernizing.

Tell us what broke

The limits of a page like this

Written August 2026, general on purpose, and covering safety glazing requirements for replacement glass in doors and enclosures. It is not a code interpretation and not a decision about any particular property. On a house that has stood for eighty or ninety years, what applies depends heavily on what has been altered since and whether it was permitted at the time.

Two authorities matter here rather than one. The building department with jurisdiction over your address decides the structural and permit questions. If the property sits in one of DeLand's historic districts, the city may also review changes to what the street can see — a separate process, on its own timetable, and worth asking about before you order anything rather than after.