Window Cleaning — Seymour Road, Elsternwick

The windows on this elevation look over the pool and start immediately above the water. There is no coping wide enough to stand on, no run of paving to foot a ladder, and nothing to brace a pole against at a workable angle. Every approach that works on an ordinary ground-floor window fails here, which is why glass in this position tends to get skipped and stay skipped. It shows on the glass. Splash dries where it lands and leaves mineral spotting rather than the loose dust a street-facing window collects, and the air directly above a pool keeps a film on the surface that ordinary rain never rinses off.

A wetsuit, and the pool itself. Standing in the water put the glass at a height and a distance that nothing on the edge could match. It is not a clever method. It is the only one that reaches. Nothing electrical went near the water. The elevation was worked pane by pane from a stable footing rather than rushed from an awkward one, and the frames and sills above the waterline were finished with the glass instead of left for a second visit that would need the wetsuit again.

• Windows above the pool cleaned from inside the water
• Wetsuit used for access, with no ladder or platform set on the pool edge
• Glass, frames and sills above the waterline finished together
• Nothing electrical taken near the water
• Before and after photographs supplied

• Glass clean on panes that cannot be reached from the pool edge at all
• Mineral spotting from splash lifted rather than smeared across the pane
• Frames and sills done with the glass, not left for later
• One visit, with no scaffold or platform built over the pool