DLF Phases 1 to 4 were the first of new Gurugram and they are now old enough to be interesting. Builder floors from the late nineties and early two-thousands, low-rise offices converted out of houses, and a lot of work that is replacement rather than first fitting. It is a very different job from a handover-stage tower ten minutes away.
Second fit-outs are not first fit-outs
Almost everything here has had something in it before, and removing it properly is real work.
An old shower screen has been sealed to the tile for fifteen years or more. It comes out, the silicone is cut and scraped back to clean tile, and occasionally a tile lifts with it. Sometimes the wall behind turns out to be damp, because the seal failed some years ago and nobody looked.
We check for that when we measure rather than on fitting day. Where there is damp, the right order is to put the cause right and then glaze - sealing new glass onto a wet wall hides it for a year and then costs you the job twice.
Twenty years of movement, and what it does to frameless
These buildings have settled. Usually only a few millimetres out of plumb, and usually nobody has ever noticed - until square-cut frameless glass goes against the wall.
Where the wall leans, a tapering gap opens along that edge. It looks like poor workmanship even though it is the building, and it cannot be filled with more silicone without looking worse.
So we check with a level while measuring and tell you what we found. A slim aluminium frame absorbs the difference inside its channel and seals properly. Where a bathroom has recently been re-tiled and the walls are true, frameless is the better-looking answer and we will say that instead. We decide it on site with you rather than in advance.
Offices in converted houses
A good number of the low-rise offices in Phases 2 and 3 were built as houses. The rooms are already divided, the ceiling height changes between them, and there is often a beam exactly where the glass wants to go.
So we measure the room rather than working from a plan, and cut each panel for the room it goes in. Where the ceiling steps, the glass follows it. Where the floor slopes, and in a building this age it often does, we set the glass line from the finished floor rather than a level line on the wall.
This is why we will not price more than a single panel from a photograph in this kind of building. A quote from a photo here is a guess, and fitting day is a bad time to find that out.
