Washington Apartments

The challenge

Working with the Fire Engineer and Council to have passive fire protection solutions approved for situations that did not have an ‘off the shelf’ solution.

Access for materials into the central courtyard was difficult. The Q team arranged to erect a mobile tower crane in a neighbouring property’s carpark and worked through the evening and into the night to crane demolition materials out and load the new materials into the Courtyard. We did this work after hours and removed the mobile tower crane and cleared the carpark before the next morning.

Our team had to work closely with the Consultants and the Auckland Council to approve and implement waterproofing solutions where we discovered previous waterproofing details had failed.

The project required constant liaising with the Property Manager and Body Corporate around access and noise disruption as a result of other parts of the complex remaining occupied (especially during periods of heavy demolition like concrete breaking).

The details

The work was completed in 2 Stages.

Stage 1 consisted of Block 2 and Stage 2 consisted of Block 3 & 4.

The apartments were vacated and empty while the work was carried out.

Q Construction set up our site establishment in the Basement carpark which included site office, materials store, welfare facilities, and sign-in/sign-out kiosks. This remained in place throughout both Stages of the project.

Scaffold and Shrink Wrap was required to all facades of the building to provide weather protection.

The building was reclad using new aluminium composite panel, new aluminium joinery was installed, new waterproofing membranes were installed, decks were retiled using a tile jack system, new glass balustrades installed, and new rubber flooring was installed to the common areas.

At the same time new glass roofs were constructed to the top floor walkways leading to the apartments on Level 4.

A very significant component to this project was the Passive Fire Upgrade.

Once the demolition work was finished a complete audit of the existing passive fire protection was carried out by the Fire Engineers and a scope of work prepared to bring the building’s passive fire protection up to the required standard. The new passive fire protection work required sections of internal wall and ceiling lining to be removed to allow the work to be carried out and then reinstated. All new passive fire work needed to be inspected and approved by both the Fire Engineer and Council before we could reinstatement the linings and finish the works.