The sectors around 50, 51 and 52 are settled residential Noida - group housing built in the 2000s, fully occupied, with mature RWAs and their own rules. Almost nothing here is a first fitting. It is bathrooms being redone, balconies being glazed, windows that have stopped sliding, and the general repair work that a fifteen-to-twenty-year-old building produces.
Taking the old one out is real work
A replacement is not a fitting with an extra step, and it is worth pricing honestly rather than discovering it.
An old shower screen has been sealed to the tile for fifteen years. It comes out, the hardened silicone is cut and scraped back to clean tile, and what is underneath is not always sound. Occasionally a tile lifts with the seal. Occasionally the wall behind is damp, because the seal failed some years ago and the water went somewhere nobody looked.
We check for that while measuring 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 the problem for about a year and then costs you the job a second time.
Fifteen years of movement, and what frameless does about it
The buildings here have settled. Usually a few millimetres out of plumb, usually unnoticed - until square-cut frameless glass goes against the wall.
Where a wall leans, a tapering gap opens along that edge. It reads as poor workmanship even though it is the building, and no amount of silicone closes it without looking worse.
So we check with a level and tell you what we found. A slim aluminium frame takes the difference up inside its channel and seals more reliably, and in a compact bathroom it often suits the room better anyway. Where a bathroom has recently been re-tiled and the walls are true, frameless is the better-looking answer and we will say so instead.
Repairs, and why we check the fitting first
A good share of what we do here is not replacement at all. It is a worn fitting.
A sliding window that will not move is nearly always its rollers - small wheels under the panel that 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 floor spring. A wardrobe shutter off its track is a runner.
We look at the fitting before we quote 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. It is also why people stop trusting the trade, and we would rather you called us again in three years.
