Residential
Fire doors and fire stopping for buildings with people living in them.
Overview
Apartment buildings, high-rise residential, build-to-rent, student accommodation, social and community housing, retirement living. Different owners, the same problem: the building is occupied, the defects are spread across common areas and individual dwellings, records may be incomplete, access has to be coordinated with residents and building management, and a repair programme has to be priced in a way that can actually be approved and delivered.
We survey the building, price a rectification programme that can actually be approved, and work through it around residents and building management — every door and penetration recorded against its location. You get a defect list that closes out, and a record the owner or strata can hand on.
We work from the register you already have
If a consultant, maintenance contractor or building manager has already produced a defect report, send it as it stands. We do not charge you to survey the building a second time. We map the defects to locations and systems, group the repeat items so they price as volume, separate the few genuine exceptions, and give you back a programme a committee or an owner can actually approve.
SOU doors are where most strata registers start
The sole-occupancy unit door — the front door of each apartment, opening onto the shared corridor — is usually a required fire door, and it is the one fire door in the building somebody lives behind. In most schemes it is common property even though a resident uses it, which is why it lands on the strata manager's desk and not the owner's.
It is also the most-altered door type in the building. Self-closers unhooked because they slam. Security screens, deadlocks, smart locks and pet doors fitted by tradespeople who were never told it was a fire door. Tags painted over every time the corridor is redecorated. Each of those changes the doorset from the thing that was tested, and each of them is a separate repair that can be priced on its own rather than a building-wide problem.
We inspect them door by door, record what has been changed on each one, and price the repair or replacement per door — so a committee can approve the work in stages instead of being handed one number for the whole building. See Fire Doors for what an SOU door inspection covers.
Common pathways
- SOU doors flagged at inspection — Fire Doors, then Fire Door Repairs & Replacement per door
- Fire-door defects across common areas — Fire Door Repairs & Replacement, or programme-wide Defect Rectification for mixed registers
- Penetrations above ceilings or in risers — Service Penetrations, or Penetration Rectification
- Building has no reliable passive-fire baseline — Passive Fire Inspection & Baseline Surveys
- Old doors or sprayed materials may contain asbestos — Asbestos Fire Doors, or the older-buildings inspection pathway, before anything is disturbed
- Mixed defects across doors, penetrations and construction — Defect Rectification, which takes doors, penetrations and fire-rated construction as one programme rather than three
- Documents and site condition disagree — Design & Technical Support, before anything is installed to the wrong detail
We price it to suit whoever has to approve it
In a strata scheme the SOU door is usually common property, so it lands on the strata manager and the committee. In build-to-rent and student accommodation there is one owner and one maintenance budget, which makes a staged programme far easier to approve. In social and community housing the landlord is an agency with its own reporting. In retirement living the operator is running a service as well as a building, and resident notice periods matter as much as access.
The passive fire work is the same in all four. What changes is who can authorise it, how fast, and what evidence they have to hold afterwards. So we price and record per door and per asset rather than per building — which means the work can be approved in stages, and whoever owns the building next inherits a record instead of a rumour.
We run it around the residents
Access notices, resident coordination, lifts and loading, noisy or dusty work, ceiling access, common-area protection, keys and escorts, reinstatement at the end of each day. We handle that side of it rather than handing it to the building manager, because on an occupied building it is the difference between a programme that runs and one that stalls after the first complaint.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
- Can you price from a defect report?
- Often, yes. Where the report identifies assets, locations and conditions clearly, it can structure the first pricing pass. Technical exceptions may still need site review.
- Do residents need to leave the building?
- That cannot be answered generically. Access and temporary controls depend on the work location and scope.
- Can you handle doors and penetrations in one programme?
- Yes. One programme, one contractor and one record covering the doors and the penetrations together, rather than two trades and two sets of paperwork.
- What happens if the building records are poor?
- A baseline survey establishes what can be identified, what appears defective, what evidence exists, and what remains unresolved.
Related
Drawings, photos or a defect report in front of you?
Send what you already have. We will tell you what else is needed before the work can be reviewed, priced or booked for site inspection.