La Vida is two towers on Leopold Street in Newstead, sharing a podium, a car park and one maintenance schedule. Painted concrete, aluminium composite panel, blade fins and a lot of glass. Abseil Pro has looked after the building since 2021.
Two towers is the thing that shapes everything here. Rigging one and coming back for the other doubles the setup, so both are worked as a single job on a single schedule, and anything the crew notices on one tower gets checked on the other while they are still on site.
At a glance
Location
Newstead, Brisbane
Services
Facade washdown, window cleaning, glass restoration, height safety
Access
Rope access and pole work, rigged from the roof
Frequency
Facade clean annually, anchors certified each year
Photos
On site
The clean
Washdown and window clean in one visit
The annual visit is a building washdown and a window clean run together, not a window clean with the render left for another year. The two towers are done back to back so the building is disrupted once instead of twice.
What the clean covers
Painted concrete walls, slab edges and ledges, and balcony soffits up to the drip edge
Metal sunshades, fins, screens and the aluminium composite panel
Exterior shell glass and frames, balustrade glass, and the inside of the window hoods
Ground floor lobby glass and the level 2 courtyards, which most contractors quietly leave out
The ground level frontage as well: lobby and tenancy windows, painted concrete, the pavement and the pylons
How it is run
Facade elements are washed with pressure where the substrate takes it and pure water where it does not, and the glass is finished traditionally. Anything within reach of a pole gets done from the ground or a balcony rather than rigged for.
Glass wants doing every six months and the facade elements every twelve, so the annual cycle covers the whole envelope, and the building can add a glass only clean in between if it wants to.
Height safety
The anchors get certified before anyone uses them
Both towers are worked on rope, so the anchor system has to be in certification before a drop is rigged. We have inspected and certified it every year since 2021, and extended it where the building needed more.
What the inspection covers
Every asset in the system across both towers, visually inspected against the manufacturer documentation and the Standards
Concrete mounted friction and chemical fixings load tested to AS/NZS 1891.4 and AS/NZS 4488.2
An information tag fitted to every anchor with the date it was checked
A report with an asset map, inspection detail and certification valid for twelve months, supplied digitally and as a printed booklet
Extended where it was needed
Where a drop could not be rigged safely off what was already there, we installed additional concrete mounted anchors rather than working around the gap. The system now reaches the parts of the facade that were previously awkward.
Anything that fails is tagged out on the spot so nobody can use it, and rectification is quoted separately rather than folded into the inspection.
How we get to it
Rigged from the roof, around two towers
Everything is rigged from the roof. Gear goes up, drops come down the elevation, and the ground stays open. Between the towers is a podium with planting, a pool and a walkway, and at the front is a row of commercial tenancies that stay trading while the crew works.
Working over a live podium
Drops are planned around what is underneath. Exclusion zones go in below live drops with a spotter on the ground, and the towers are worked one elevation at a time so nothing is closed off for longer than it takes.
The commercial frontage gets done in a way that keeps the footpath open, which usually means poles from ground level rather than a drop and a closed walkway.
How we leave it
Tools tethered on every drop, and nothing dropped from height
Exclusion zones and signage set up before a drop starts and packed away after it
The pool, the podium and the tenancies kept usable, with drops sequenced around them
Keys and access codes back to management before anyone leaves
Anything noticed on the facade written up with a photo and a location
Photos uploaded the same day, so the record exists whether or not anyone asks for it
The glass
Restoring the glass
Hard water staining that has set into glass is not dirt. No amount of washing takes it off, and once glass is etched the usual answer is replacement.
The alternative is restoration: handheld rotary buffers and a cutting compound, worked panel by panel, mopping and squeegeeing first so nothing abrasive is still on the glass when the pad touches it. A badly stained panel can take ten minutes on its own, which is why it is done in stages.
So the buffing rides along with the cleaning cycles rather than being one enormous job. Each visit takes on another batch of panels, and the glass gets clearer year on year without the building ever writing a cheque for new glazing.
Outcome
What the building gets
Two towers cleaned top to bottom on one schedule, including the ground level frontage and the courtyards that usually get left off the scope. One mobilisation, one crew, one set of exclusion zones, rather than paying to rig the same building twice.
The rest is what comes from the same people being on the facade every year. The anchors are certified and extended by the crew who hang off them, and every visit leaves photographs of parts of the building nobody can otherwise see, so when the committee asks what is happening up there, it is already written down.
