01 Sep Technical Repairs
TECHNICAL REPAIRS –
FINDING THE CAUSE, NOT JUST FIXING THE SYMPTOM
When it comes to residential building repairs, there are generally two approaches.
There’s the Band-Aid approach—fix what you can see, cover it up and hope the problem doesn’t return.
Then there’s the approach we prefer at ProBuilder: delve deeper, understand why the failure occurred, and repair the actual cause.
Occasionally, a well-considered Band-Aid can provide a very good long-term solution. But in our experience, that’s the exception rather than the rule.
The series of photographs here shows what we call the ProBuilder Repairs Method.
It starts with investigation.
Often that means destructive demolition—carefully removing tiles, membranes, sheeting or other substrates so we can actually see what is happening beneath the surface.
Once we’ve opened up a building, however, we’ve also created a new responsibility: protecting it from the weather.
And anyone who has lived in Brisbane over the past decade knows just how wet our weather can be. Throwing a piece of plastic over an opening and hoping for the best simply isn’t good enough. Even during the investigation stage, we need proper temporary waterproofing and weather protection.
Once we find the problem, the real technical work begins.
What caused it?
Why did it fail?
What is Plan A?
Is there a better Plan B?
What are the potential red flags?
And how do we make sure it doesn’t happen again?
We test our theories and consult the people who need to be involved—our specialist sub-trades, architects and engineers. We sit down as a team and challenge the proposed solution from different angles.
Our team has more than 100 years of combined building experience, and those discussions are invaluable. No matter how experienced one person may be, technical building repairs benefit enormously from having several experienced people around the table asking, “What are we missing?”
Once we understand the problem and have developed the repair methodology, we establish preliminary pricing before properly costing the works.
Then comes execution.
On exposed areas such as rooftop decks and balconies, the building can remain vulnerable for weeks while the existing structure is removed, altered and rebuilt correctly.
That requires another layer of planning.
Sometimes protection might be as simple as a properly secured tarpaulin. On more complex projects, like the one shown here, we may effectively envelope the building so that when one of Brisbane’s unpredictable summer storms appears on the radar, we can go home knowing our client’s property is protected.
Only then do we work through the process of altering and rebuilding the structure as it should have been constructed.
And here’s the interesting part about technical repairs:
When we’ve finished, it may look almost exactly the same as it did before.
The tiles may look similar. The balcony may look similar. The finished surface may give very little indication of the investigation, meetings, engineering, waterproofing, carpentry, detailing, temporary protection and careful execution that happened underneath it.
But that’s where the value is.
A house isn’t designed to tolerate slow, constant water ingress. Left unresolved, seemingly minor leaks can cause significant deterioration to the structure hidden beneath the finishes.
At ProBuilder Repairs, we’re very proud of this side of our business.
We don’t just want to make the problem disappear.
We want to understand why it happened—and then do everything we reasonably can to make sure it stays fixed.
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