This job was a typical example of landlord neglect. A maisonette above a shop on the very busy Western Road in Hove. The facade had clearly not had any maintenance for over 10 years. As a result the old timber sash windows were in a very sad state. The paint was very flaky and parts of the cills were so rotten they'd fallen off. There were also a couple of major cracks in the walls.

With the windows, we began by removing all the rotten wood which was very spongy and waterlogged. Interestingly enough we discovered that the wood was rotting as much from the inside out as vice versa! The simple reason for this was the amount of condensation seeping into the window structure from the inside due to long term tenants who, by the looks of it, never opened the windows!

The next stage was to completely burn off all the old paint and sand the timber to get a smooth, sound surface to repaint. We replaced all the rotten wood with new timber cut to size to match the original.

The cracks on walls had been superficially filled before, but to be repaired properly they needed to be thoroughly raked them out to remove all loose material. Then repaired with two layers of render.