Yes, and a leaning wall is the normal condition rather than the exception. Older Bergen County bathrooms rarely hand anyone a plumb wall or a level curb. Accurate Glass & Mirror takes that lean up in the channel and the hardware instead of forcing a square panel into a crooked opening, and where the lean runs deep the glass itself is cut on a rake.
Into the parts you are not meant to notice. A wall channel is sized with room to shim behind it and a sealant line in front, which swallows a surprising amount of discrepancy over the height of a panel. Hinge plates carry their own adjustment, and a header bar can hold a true horizontal across an opening whose top is anything but.
The door is always hung plumb regardless of what the wall is doing. That is the rule everything else serves, because a door hung to a leaning wall drifts: it swings itself open when you let go, or creeps shut on its own weight, and no amount of adjustment later fixes what was set wrong at the start.
When the lean is more than a channel and a sealant joint can honestly hide. The edge of the panel is then cut on a slight angle so it follows the face of the wall, and against tile with a clean joint it reads as intentional rather than as a repair. It is a routine cut, decided from template numbers rather than in the field.
There are limits. Rake a panel too far and the eye starts comparing the glass edge against a horizontal tile line, and the fix looks worse than the flaw. At that point the better conversation is a filler strip, a different hardware layout, or getting the wall corrected before glass is ordered.
Because heavy tempered panels are finished before they are heat treated. Every notch, hole and worked edge is done while the glass is raw, and the moment it comes out of the furnace the size is permanent. A panel that is a hair large cannot be shaved on site, and one that is small stays small. That is the whole reason the opening is templated after the tile is grouted and the pan is complete, with a level and a straightedge on every surface, rather than measured off a set of plans.
It is handled the same way, at the bottom rather than at the side. The panel sits in a shoe or on clips with room to shim, and the sealant line closes the remaining difference. A curb pitched back into the shower is a good thing for drainage. A curb pitched out into the bathroom gets flagged before any glass is ordered.
Frequently, and it is the harder of the two. A lean is a straight line the hardware can follow, while a belly in the tile leaves a gap that opens and closes across the height of the panel. A straightedge finds it during the template, and the answer is a deeper channel, a filler, or corrected tile.
Heavy tempered glass at 3/8 and 1/2 inch is cut once and cannot be adjusted on the wall, so the numbers come first. We template the finished opening, record where each surface leans and by how much, and build the panel to those readings rather than to a nominal size.
