Grade II listed 16th century property

We were approached by loss adjusters for an interesting, large-scale project, the largest individual project we have ever worked on. A policyholder’s Grade II-listed 16th-century property had been catastrophically damaged through an act of vandalism. Black gloss paint, notoriously difficult to remove, had been thrown all over their solid wood kitchen, original tiled floor, windows, walls and skirting boards. Extensive damage was caused throughout the ground floor of the property.

Challenge:

The loss adjuster involved had spoken to several specialist disaster restoration companies.

All had viewed the property and were unable to provide a solution other than complete strip out and replacement, with new flooring and kitchen, such was the damage caused. This was with an anticipated cost in excess of £90,000.

Solution:

Our team was able to provide an alternative solution, project managing the entire assignment, recommending that all of the damage could be fully restored at a fraction of the cost and in much reduced timescales.

We originally attended the property to provide a full triage report of the damage caused. During this visit, we carried out several small tests on areas of the damage to assess what could be restored.

To the customer's delight, our assessment concluded that we would be able to repair all of the damage in the property.

The project involved a full-scale restoration to the entire ground floor. The work included stripping back wooden worktops, reoiling, and refinishing them. We used our marble polishing process to clean and restore marble worktops and restored the original period floor, each individual tile was hand-restored, with grout colour created to match the undamaged part of the floor.

We even fully cleaned, sanded, and resprayed the Rangemaster cooker. The most challenging part was restoring the bespoke solid wood kitchen cabinets to a standard that they could be repainted. The paint damage was so severe, our finishers had to be meticulous in their process to get it back to a standard that could then be repainted and look like new again.

Outcome:

The entire project took just one month to complete, reducing the claim cycle by seven months.

The policyholder was only required to find alternative accommodation for two weeks during this time. Had the insurer gone through the replacement process, the policyholder was warned that they would have to leave the property for a minimum of eight months.

Costs were considerably cheaper, total costs were one-third of the original replacement. More importantly, some of the features of this property were irreplaceable. Period features dating back to the start of the last century would have been lost forever.

The reduction in landfill cannot be underestimated here; nothing was thrown away, and every part of the house was fully restored.