I had a contractor do some work for me once. Something wasn’t working right, and every time I brought it up he had an excuse ready. “Oh, we always get this with these ones.” That kind of thing.

So I asked him straight: did you check it before you started?

He hadn’t. I could tell by the way he looked away and grunted something instead of answering. If I’d pushed harder it would’ve turned into an argument. I didn’t bother.

That’s stuck with me, because it’s exactly the kind of thing that causes problems with sliding door glass replacements.

If you don’t check the door properly before you start, you don’t know what was already wrong with it. Then when the job’s done and the wheels aren’t rolling right, or the door’s dragging, the customer thinks the glass replacement caused it. It didn’t. It was like that before we got there. We just never told them.

That’s on us, not the door.

Adelaide Glaziers tries to check the door properly before starting. We’re not perfect, there’s a lot to check and things do happen, even to the best of us. But when we do it right, and check first, the customer knows about any existing issue upfront, before we’ve touched anything. It’s not us covering ourselves, it’s just honesty. You can’t fix a problem you never mentioned.

Now, if we can get the door running a bit better while we’re in there, within reason, we will. We’re not going to replace a pane of glass and leave a door that could easily roll smoother just because “that’s not our job.” That’s not how Adelaide Glaziers operates.

But there’s a difference between doing a bit extra within reason, and taking on someone else’s sliding door repair job under the cover of a glass replacement. If the wheels need resetting, or there’s a track issue, or something structural is going on with the door itself, that’s a different job. If that job came through on its own, I might not even take it. So why would I want to inherit it after the fact, unpaid, just because we happened to be there replacing glass?

Check first. Tell the customer what you find. Do the job you’re there to do, and help where it’s reasonable to help. That’s it. It’s not complicated, but skipping the check is where all of this goes wrong.