Skyring Apartments stands on Festival Place in Newstead, seventeen levels of shell glass, balustrades, painted render and aluminium composite panel, with planted terraces wrapping the first four floors. Abseil Pro has run the building since 2022.
The work falls into three jobs that all hang off the same roof: the annual window and facade clean, the prune on the terraces that keeps the planting off the building, and the anchor certification that lets anyone go over the edge in the first place.
At a glance
Location
Newstead, Brisbane
Services
Window and facade cleaning, terrace pruning, height safety inspection
Access
Rope access, rigged from the roof
Frequency
Facade clean annually, anchors certified each year
Photos
On site
The clean
One cycle, the whole envelope
The clean is a fixed annual service rather than a quote each time, so the building knows what it is getting and when. Glass and balustrades are the visible half of it. The other half is everything around them, which is what actually holds dirt.
What the clean covers
Exterior shell glass and frames, and the outside of every balcony balustrade and its framing
Painted render, slab edges and ledges, where run off collects and stains the hardest
Balcony soffits, cleaned up to the drip edge
Metal sunshades, fins, screens and the aluminium composite panel, all cleaned with the glass rather than after it
Residents can opt in to have their own balcony done while the crew is on that face, booked and invoiced with us directly
How it is run
Cleaning is pure water through a brush head on most of the envelope, with traditional window cleaning where the glass needs it. Drops run top to bottom so nothing already cleaned gets dirtied again on the way down.
Glass wants doing every six months and the facade elements every twelve, so the annual cycle covers the whole envelope and the glass can be topped up in between if the building wants it.
Height safety
The anchors get certified before anyone uses them
The whole building is worked on rope, which means the roof anchor system has to be in certification before a drop is rigged. We inspect and certify it every year.
What the inspection covers
Every anchor and component in the system inspected to AS/NZS 1891.4 and AS/NZS 4488.2
Chemical and friction set concrete anchors load tested, everything else a visual inspection
An inspection tag fitted to every component with the date it was checked
An inspection report listing every asset, and a compliance certificate valid for twelve months
Certified before it lapses
The inspection is booked ahead of the clean rather than after it, so the crew is never rigging off a system whose certificate has quietly run out. It is the same principle as checking the ladder before you climb it.
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, worked top to bottom
Everything is rigged from the roof. Keys signed out from management, gear carried up, then down the elevation on rope. Nothing goes on the footpath, nothing blocks the driveway, and the building keeps running around us.
Working over a lived in building
Every drop passes somebody's balcony. Residents are notified before the crew starts on their face of the building, and drops are sequenced elevation by elevation so nobody has a technician outside their window for a week.
Exclusion zones go in below live drops with a spotter on the ground, and the terraces at levels 1 to 4 mean there is usually planting, furniture or a path directly under the work.
How we leave it
Tools tethered on every drop, and nothing dropped from height
Green waste bagged on the rope rather than dropped, and taken off site the same day
Exclusion zones and signage set up before a drop starts and packed away after it
Keys and access cards back to management before anyone leaves
Waterproofing and irrigation problems on the terraces written up and reported rather than left
Photos uploaded the same day, so the record exists whether or not anyone asks for it
The gardens
Keeping four levels of planting off the building
The terraces on levels 1 to 4 are the part nobody can reach. Planting set into the building grows out over the edge and back into the facade, and the flamevine in particular will take a wall and then die back into a curtain of dead stem that hangs there until somebody on a rope cuts it out.
The prune is a hard one rather than a tidy up: vegetation cut back towards the facade, flamevine hard pruned in the planters, dead growth and firesticks taken out, and the lot bagged and carried off site. It runs with a team of two over several days, because the only way onto those beds is on rope.
The height the planting is left at is a conversation, not a default. Residents on level 4 have a view through it, so management asks them first and the crew cuts to what was agreed. While they are in there they look at what the planting is sitting on, and any waterproofing or irrigation problem gets photographed and reported.
Outcome
What the building gets
A facade that gets the whole envelope done once a year rather than the glass done often and the render never, terraces that stay pruned back off the building instead of growing into it, and an anchor system certified before the ropes go on it. Three jobs, one crew, one rig.
