Say It Ain't So, Marvin

The delivery of the big slider has been hanging over my head for a week or so, and this morning it finally happened. When I ordered a 12' patio slider, I'd expected it to come disassembled. The sliders I installed this past winter had to be put together frame first in the rough opening and then the glass panels fit into place. Slider assembly is no fun. So I was pleasantly surprised and a little intimidated when I learned that the slider I'd ordered from Marvin came pre-assembled. It came ready for the rough opening just like a window, nailing fins and all. The intimidating part was handling such a large piece. When it arrived this morning, the two stationary panels were fixed in the frame and the middle operating panel was in it's own box to be installed once the frame was in place. With the help of Chris, our neighbor, we got the slider off the truck easily enough. Within 20 minutes of delivery, it was ready to go in the hole. That's when I noticed something a little funny. At the bottom corner of the left fixed panel there was an eighth of an inch gap between the edge of the panel and the frame. When I put a straight edge on the frame it showed the same 8th inch out of straight. After a few hours of trying to figure out what, exactly, was out of whack, I finally realized that I could withdraw the screws holding the frame to the panel. That allowed the frame to go straight. The gap, however, remained; now it ran from bottom to top, an 8th inch to nothing. The screws had been flexing the frame in the middle making it look like the bottom was bent out. The real problem is that the panel was fixed in the frame but the frame wasn't square. Unfortunately, this isn't an easy fix because, though the side of the panel was free after I pulled the screws, the top and bottom of the panel remain siliconed in place. The three hours I spent figuring this out also involved back and forth phone calls between between me and Eric at Viking Lumber and Eric and Marvin Windows. In the end we decided that I'd done enough investigating and that a Marvin representative would come and fix it early next week. Chris, Michelle and I carefully moved the slider into the house, and what could have been an easy hour's worth of successful installation had wasted an entire morning.