Indirapuram is society housing at close quarters - Ahinsa Khand, Niti Khand, Nyay Khand, Vaibhav Khand, block after block of it built in the 2000s. Almost every job here is a replacement in an occupied flat, with neighbours on all six sides. The work itself is ordinary. Doing it without becoming a problem for the block is the skill.
The RWA notice is the specification for the day
In Indirapuram the flat is yours and the building is not. The RWA sets when work may happen, and it is normally written on a notice at the gate: hours, a noise rule, which lift takes materials, and often something about weekends.
We plan the day to finish inside that window, and this matters more for glass than for most trades. A shower enclosure is not a job that can be left 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 complete. The noisy part - cutting out the old seal, drilling the tile - happens early in the window rather than at four in the afternoon. And we take the mess with us, because glass dust on a shared stair is how a job gets stopped on day two.
Twenty years of use, and what actually fails
The buildings here went up in the 2000s, and they are now at the age where things are being put right rather than patched.
Most of what fails is a fitting, not a frame. A sliding window that will not move is nearly always its rollers - small wheels under the panel, worn out after ten to fifteen years. Changing them takes under an hour and costs a fraction of a new window. A door catching on the floor has dropped on its hinge or floor spring. A wardrobe shutter off its track is a runner.
We check the fitting before quoting a replacement, and we say plainly which it is. Selling a whole new window when the rollers were the problem is the easiest sale in this trade, and it is the reason people stop trusting it. We would rather you called us again in three years.
Replacing a shower screen properly
The screen that is there has been sealed to the tile for fifteen years or more, and taking it out is real work rather than a preliminary.
It comes out, the hardened 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 some years ago and the water went somewhere nobody looked.
We look for that when we measure, not on fitting day. Where there is damp, the right order is to fix the cause and then glaze. New glass sealed onto a wet wall hides the problem for about a year, and then you pay for the job twice. We would rather tell you that and have the job wait a week.
