Mayur Vihar is flats - DDA blocks and co-operative societies across three phases, built from the eighties onward. Nearly all our work here is replacement rather than first fitting: a shower curtain becoming an enclosure, a steel window becoming aluminium, twenty-year-old fittings finally giving up. The buildings are similar enough that we usually know what we will find before we arrive.
Taking the old one out is half the job
A replacement is not a fitting with an extra step. Removing what is there is real work and it deserves to be priced honestly.
An old shower screen has been sealed to the tile for fifteen or twenty years. It comes out, the old silicone is cut and scraped back to clean tile, and what is underneath is not always sound. Sometimes a tile lifts with the seal. Sometimes the wall behind is damp, because the seal failed years ago and the water went somewhere.
We look for that when we measure, not on fitting day. If there is damp, the right order is to deal with it and then glaze. Sealing new glass onto a wet wall hides the problem for about a year and then costs you the job twice.
What twenty years does to a wall
In a building of this age the bathroom walls have moved. Usually only a few millimetres, and usually nobody has ever noticed - until frameless glass goes against them.
Frameless panels are cut square. Where the wall leans, a tapering gap opens along that edge, and it looks like poor work even though it is the building. It cannot be filled with silicone without looking worse.
So we check with a level and tell you what we found. A slim aluminium frame takes the difference up inside the channel and seals properly, and in a compact older bathroom it usually suits the room better as well. Where the bathroom has been re-tiled recently and the walls are true, frameless is the better-looking answer and we will say that instead.
The society's hours are the working day
Across the Mayur Vihar societies the RWA sets when work may happen, and it is normally a window in the middle of the day with a rule about weekends.
We plan to finish inside that window. This matters more for glass than for most trades, because a shower enclosure is not a job you can leave halfway - the glass either stands and is sealed or it does not stand at all.
So we size the day's work to what will genuinely finish, do the noisy part first, and take the mess with us. Glass dust on a shared stair is how a job gets stopped on day two, and cleaning up at the end of each day is simply the reason we are let back in on the next one.
