Palam Vihar is independent floors and small society blocks, most of them built in the late nineties and early two-thousands. Almost nothing we do here is a first fitting. It is bathrooms being redone, aluminium windows replacing the originals, and the steady flow of repairs that a building of this age produces. Predictable work, in buildings without lifts.
Most of this is repair, and that should be said plainly
A large share of what we do in Palam Vihar is not replacement at all. It is putting right a fitting that has worn out.
A sliding window that will not move is nearly always its rollers - the small wheels under the panel, which wear 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 usually dropped on its hinge or its floor spring. A wardrobe shutter off its track is a runner.
We check the fitting before we quote a replacement, and we tell you which it is. Selling somebody a whole new window when the rollers were the problem is the easiest sale in this trade. It is also the reason people stop trusting the trade, and we would rather have you call us again.
Twenty-year-old bathrooms
The bathrooms here were fitted around the same time as the buildings, and they are now at the age where things are being redone properly rather than patched.
Removing what is there is real work. An old screen has been sealed to the tile for years; it comes out, the silicone is cut and scraped back, and sometimes a tile lifts with it or the wall behind turns out to be damp.
We look for that when we measure rather than 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.
No lift, and what it means for panel size
Independent floors here almost never have a lift. Everything is carried up, and the stair turn sets the largest panel.
We measure the turn when we measure the bathroom. It is a two-minute check that prevents a made-to-size panel arriving at a building it cannot enter - toughened glass cannot be cut down afterwards or persuaded round a corner.
Where a taller run is wanted, we split it with a slim vertical joint. And where several flats in the same block want work, say so: the measuring visit, the delivery and the team's day are the costs that do not shrink with a small job, and sharing them across two or three flats brings the price down noticeably for each.
