The Building
140 Church Street is a 100-lot residential strata building in the heart of Parramatta, built in 2007. Like a lot of buildings from that era, the render and expansion joint systems were never going to last 18 years without attention. By the time we were engaged, cracking and delamination had spread across several elevations, and the expansion joints, the flexible seals that let the building move without tearing the facade apart, had hardened and started failing. Once those joints stop flexing, water finds its way behind the render instead of running off it. This is the kind of remedial work our abseiling painters Sydney team carries out regularly, where strata buildings of this age and type make up a large share of the work.
Why Rope Access on This Site
Church Street sits in the middle of Parramatta’s CBD. Footpath traffic, nearby retail, and a constant flow of vehicles meant scaffolding wasn’t a realistic option without closing off public space for weeks and creating a genuine disruption to the businesses around the building. We’ve written before about why rope access usually beats scaffolding on sites like this, and Church Street was a clear example of it in practice. Rope access let our team work directly off the roof, covering every elevation without a single square metre of footpath closure.
It also meant we could move between elevations as needed rather than being locked into whatever a scaffold structure allowed access to. Architectural details, balcony returns, and the upper sections around parapets all got the same attention as the main flat wall surfaces.
Render Repairs
Cracked and delaminated render gets removed back to sound substrate, not skimmed over. Anything left loose or hollow-sounding when tapped comes off. The repair render system we use is matched for flexibility and bond strength to the original substrate, and every patch gets finished flush so it doesn’t read as a repair once the building’s repainted. Where render damage extends into the underlying concrete, this overlaps with the work covered on our high-rise concrete repairs page, since cracked render is often the first visible sign of a concrete substrate issue underneath. On a building this size, that’s a lot of individual sections to assess and treat one at a time rather than a single blanket fix.
Expansion Joint Replacement
The existing joints on this building had gone hard and brittle, the point where a flexible joint stops doing its job. A joint that can’t move with the building either tears, which lets water straight in, or transfers that movement stress to the render either side of it, which is often where we were finding the worst cracking. Every failing joint was cut out and replaced with a new flexible system rated to handle the building’s expected thermal and structural movement while staying watertight.
Surface Preparation and Repaint
Every external surface was pressure washed to remove old contamination and failed coating before any repair work started, not just before the final paint went on. Once repairs were sealed and primed, the full building was coated in a UV-resistant exterior system suited to a Parramatta summer, where western and northern elevations take serious direct sun for most of the day.
Rope access made it possible to apply that coating with the same consistency across the whole facade, including sections a scaffold lift would have struggled to reach cleanly, like balcony undersides and tight architectural reveals.
Outcome
The building’s exterior is weathertight again, with the joint failures and render damage that were letting moisture in now properly resolved rather than just painted over. For an owners corporation managing a 100-lot building, that’s the difference between an annual maintenance budget and an unplanned structural repair bill a few years down the track.
Need Facade Repairs Without Scaffolding Disruption?
Next Level Painting carries out rope access painting, render repairs and remedial facade repairs for commercial and strata buildings across Sydney. Get in touch to arrange an inspection of your building.
