Consequential damage

 Today I am looking after some contractors who are repairing a cupboard at my daughter's house which had been damaged when her geyser burst some weeks ago. As with anyone in South Africa who has a mortgage with a bank or other financial institution, she has Homeowners Cover, an insurance policy that covers any structural damage, fire damage or damage from any water problems such as a burst water pipe. This insurance is to protect the financial institution, as the home is considered part of their assets while the mortgage is still in operation. Of course, it also protects the homeowner from the kind of damage that can often be very costly to repair or remedy.

Damage to the cupboard that houses the geyser

In this instance, as is often the case, the insurers are very quick to repair the immediate problem: the geyser was replaced within a matter of days. But often the "consequential damage", the secondary and less urgent result of the initial problem, seems to be taken far less seriously. My family have never had a problem with the insurers agreeing to cover this work, but my point is that this may often take several weeks, if not months to be attended to.

While it is heartening that the insurers put pressure on their contractors attending to the urgent issues, it is quite frustrating that this is not done with those attending to the consequential damage. Of course, limiting this kind of damage would be a great idea - back in the day, it was standard to have a drip-tray under every geyser, but this was in the days of unpressurised geysers, where dripping was a regular occurrence.

Another kind of household building disaster relates to water supply pipes. With few exceptions (such as showers) drainage pipes are designed and installed to be fully accessible. Pipes may simply be visible on the outside walls of the building, or may be hidden in a duct that has an easily removeable panel. The reasons are twofold - on the one hand, drainage pipe blockages are so commonplace, especially kitchen sinks, and on the other, there are hygiene concerns. If a blockage to a drainpipe were only discovered quite a while after this has occurred because it is built into a wall or floorslab, the building structure could have been quite saturated with contaminated water.

Water supply pipes, by contrast, are often built in, running within walls or floor slabs. When they leak, the first sign is a damp patch, and frustratingly, often quite far from the actual problem. The result may be extensive opening up of the wall or slab to discover the source. As with the geyser problem, the insurers are often quick to arrange for the leak to be fixed, but regard the repair to walls and slabs to be much less urgent.

Another problem with water pipes is that they often run in walls that are tiled, in bathrooms and kitchens. If the leak occurs several decades after the house is built, it may be difficult to match these tiles. Even plain while wall tiles have changed in surface finish and edge detailing over the years. For example, in the 1930s, standard while tiles were square-cut on their edges, whereas more modern ones have slightly rounded edges. While this may sound very minor, it is quite visually disturbing to see a "patch job" with different generations of tiles.

An even bigger problem arises with coloured or patterned tiles - matching them is often impossible even just a few years after they have been installed. In the photo below, the wall supporting the bath had been opened up at one end, so here we removed the tiles from the entire walling around the bath, and replaced them with a design that blended with the existing colour, but purposely contrasted in texture so that the result looked like a feature.

the entire wall below the bath has been re-tiled 

This same disaster meant that the walls to the shower in the other bathroom also had to be opened up. As with the bath, we had the tiles of the entire wall removed, including the return nib, so that the new tiles looked intentional. 

One wall and its return nib in the new tiles

The lesson here is to consider the whole space when one is doing repairs and not just the area of the immediate problem. In the case of the re-tiling, the repairs have actually enhanced the spaces, partly through the careful choice of tile to blend in with the colour but contrast with the texture, and because not just the damaged wall was re-done, but its adjacent wall, so that it reads as a design entity.