The building or project condition
Called in at practical completion, after the penetrations had been missed during construction.
What FRS delivered
- Surveyed the building to find every penetration that had been left unsealed
- Sealed all of them, across every trade, to systems supported for the actual substrate and services
- Produced the penetration record the project should have been building all along
- Completed inside the practical completion window
What made it difficult
- Practical completion, so the programme had no slack in it at all
- The work had been missed during construction, which meant finding the penetrations before sealing them
- Ceilings, linings and services already in place, so access was whatever the finished building allowed
- Regional mobilisation to the South West
- A public venue with a fixed opening date, so the handover was not going to move
- A venue fitted out to a finish, so protection of completed surfaces mattered as much as the work itself
- High volumes over the auditorium and foyer, where reaching a penetration meant elevated work platforms rather than a ladder
- Other trades still closing out their own defects in the same spaces, on the same days
- Two and a half hours from Perth, so anything forgotten was a day, not an hour
What was recorded at close-out
- Location-by-location penetration record with photographs
- Certificate of Compliance
Penetrations get missed. Each trade assumes another one is sealing behind it, nobody holds the package, and the gap only becomes visible when the building is finished and somebody asks for the records.
That is when we were called — at practical completion, on a public venue in the South West with an opening date already set.
The finding is the hard part, not the sealing. By practical completion the ceilings are in, the linings are up and the services are run, so the openings are behind whatever was built in front of them. We went through the building, found them, and sealed the lot to systems supported for the substrate and the services actually passing through — then handed over the location record and the certificate the project had never had.
A builder in this position usually expects a delay. There was not one.
