Exterior Window Cleaning — Orrong Road, Armadale

Two storeys is exactly the height where a water-fed pole earns its keep. It reaches from the ground, it is fast, and nothing leans on the building. On most blocks this size that is the whole answer. Timber changes the sum. A pole delivers a lot of water and it runs down the pane rather than evaporating off it, and old timber sashes do not seal the way aluminium does. There is a gap where the two sashes meet, a gap where the sash sits in its frame, and putty that has usually perished somewhere along its life. Water finds all three. On a house that is an annoyance for the owner. On an apartment building it is somebody else's floor and curtains, and the complaint goes to whoever booked the clean.

So the volume came down and the control went up. The glass was worked with the water kept on the pane and off the meeting rail and the bottom rail, rather than flooded and left to run wherever it wanted to go. Sills were dried rather than left wet, because a wet timber sill is how you get a mark the next morning that looks like a leak even when nothing actually got through. That is slower than flooding an elevation, and it is the difference between a clean building and an incident. Four hours across two technicians on a block this size reflects where the time went: into restraint rather than into reach. Exterior only on this visit, which also keeps it simple. Nobody has to be home, and no appointments have to be made with eight separate residents to get one elevation finished.

• All external glazing cleaned across both levels
• Water volume kept controlled on timber sashes rather than flooded
• Flow kept off meeting rails, bottom rails and perished putty lines
• Sills dried rather than left wet
• Exterior only, so no access to individual apartments was needed

• Two technicians, four hours
• Both levels finished with nothing getting past a sash
• No resident access required and no interior appointments to arrange