Service areas
Remedial builders in Drummoyne & Five Dock
Our own postcode. Balcony, facade and waterproofing remediation for strata buildings across the City of Canada Bay, from an office two kilometres away.
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The buildings here are at the age that fails
Drummoyne and Five Dock hold one of the Inner West’s densest concentrations of walk-up apartment blocks. Most are now between forty and sixty years old.
That is the age at which reinforced concrete built to the standards of the day starts to tell you about it. Cover to the steel was thinner then, the balcony slabs are exposed, and the peninsula sits in salt-laden air off the Parramatta River on three sides.
The result is the work we are called for most often here: spalling along balcony edges and soffits, rust staining that turns out to be section loss, and membranes at the end of a service life nobody scheduled. Left alone it is not cosmetic. The crack is the reinforcement expanding.
We work alongside your structural engineer from the first assessment through to certified sign-off, and we do it in buildings people are living in throughout. That is the constraint that decides everything else: staging, access, noise hours, and who tells the residents what is happening.
What we are called for in Canada Bay
Remedial scopes, priced against an engineer’s report rather than a guess.
Concrete spalling repair
Balcony edges, soffits and columns. Cut back to sound concrete, reinforcement treated, made good to the engineer’s detail.
Balcony waterproofing
Full strip and re-membrane, falls corrected, then tiled and reinstated. The stage most often skipped in a cheap repair.
Facade and envelope
Lintel replacement, cavity flashings, external brickwork and rendered facades brought back to standard.
Diagnostic assessment
Where the damage is spreading and nobody has established why. A report a committee can act on and price against.
Occupied-building delivery
Staged access, scheduled works, and residents told before their balcony becomes a work site rather than after.
Certified sign-off
Delivered under an audited quality system, evidenced at each hold point, backed by our ten-year workmanship guarantee.
Why Drummoyne and Five Dock buildings fail the way they do
The peninsula is almost surrounded by water, and the wind carries salt off it. Chloride is what turns ordinary weathering into concrete cancer: it reaches the reinforcement, the steel corrodes, corroded steel occupies more space than sound steel, and the concrete cover cracks off from the inside. By the time it is visible from the courtyard the process has been running for years.
Two things make the local stock more exposed than most. The blocks built through the 1960s and 70s were designed to a lower cover requirement than today’s standard, so there is less concrete between the salt and the steel. And balconies here are usually cantilevered slabs with the top surface directly weathered. It is the single most vulnerable element on the building.
The waterproofing underneath it
Most balcony membranes have a design life well short of the building’s. When one fails, water tracks through the slab and attacks the reinforcement from above while the salt works in from the face. This is why a repair that patches the spalled edge and re-tiles over the original membrane comes back: the cause was never addressed, and the second failure is usually worse than the first.
A remediation worth paying for strips the balcony, corrects the falls, lays a new membrane, and reinstates. It costs more and it is the only version that ends the problem.
Working in occupied strata
Almost every building we are asked about here is occupied, and that shapes the programme more than the engineering does. Residents lose the use of a balcony for a period, scaffold goes up past bedroom windows, and there is noise inside approved hours.
What an owners corporation should expect from a contractor: a staging plan showing which lines are affected and when, notice to residents before each stage rather than during it, hold points evidenced as they are reached so the engineer signs off progressively, and one person who answers the phone. Those are the terms we work on.
Approvals through the City of Canada Bay
Remedial work to an existing building is often exempt or complying development, but not always. The trigger is usually whether the external appearance changes, whether the building is in a conservation area, and the building’s classification. We work that out before pricing rather than after, because the answer changes the programme.
Where we are
Our office is in Russell Lea, inside the same postcode as Five Dock and about two kilometres from Drummoyne. For remedial work that matters more than it sounds: an assessment can happen this week rather than being batched with a run of jobs across the city, and someone can be back on site the day a committee asks a question.
Work nearby
Remediation we have delivered
The same building type, the same constraint: occupied apartments, throughout.
Rockdale Gardens
4,500 m² of balcony remediation across 120 occupied apartments, plus a full pool, spa and sauna rebuild. Delivered three months ahead of programme with a zero-failure record.
View the case study
Goulburn Mixed-Use
A heritage-listed building taken from dilapidated shop-top housing to five apartments, with ten commercial tenancies trading below every day of the programme.
View the case study
Structural remediation
Concrete repairs, facade upgrades, waterproofing and remedial consulting. How we work, what it covers, and what the guarantee means.
See the service
Local questions
Can’t see what you need? Call John on 0418 469 454.
Yes. Occupied strata is most of our remedial work. We deal directly with owners corporations, strata managers and the building’s engineer, and we are used to being the contractor named in a scope somebody else wrote.
Our office is in Russell Lea, so Drummoyne is about two kilometres away and Five Dock is in the same postcode.
Rust staining, cracks running parallel to a balcony edge, and render that sounds hollow when tapped all point to reinforcement corroding underneath. Render cracking on its own usually does not follow the line of the steel.
The honest answer is that it needs looking at, and the assessment is free. What it should not get is a repair quote before anyone has established the cause.
In almost every case, yes. We stage the work so that only part of the building is affected at a time, keep to approved noise hours, and give residents notice before their balcony becomes a work site rather than after.
Losing the use of a balcony for a period is usually unavoidable. Losing the use of the apartment normally is not.
Often not. Much remedial work is exempt or complying development because it restores an existing building rather than changing it. It depends on whether the external appearance changes, the building’s classification, and whether it sits in a conservation area.
We establish that with the City of Canada Bay before pricing, because the answer changes the programme and therefore the number.
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Whether it's a structural report that needs answers or a home that deserves better.
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