month 11
Reporting a repair, getting access, and what the log records
A repair is a date, a room and a description, and it stays open until all three are answered. Report anything that needs attention to landlords@janandbakht.life. November is the month the board turns to this work deliberately, because most of what fails in January can be found in November.
What a report needs to say
Six things make a report that can be acted on the same day. The property and the room. The item, named as plainly as possible — the mixer tap in the kitchen, the second radiator in the back bedroom. When it started, and whether it has got worse since. Whether water, gas or electricity is involved, because that decides the order it is taken in. One photograph, which saves a visit more often than it does not. And the times access is possible, given as windows rather than as a single hour.
What a report does not need is a diagnosis. A description of what is happening is more useful than a guess at why, and nobody is expected to know whether a damp patch is a leak or condensation before reporting it.
Three things to find before you need them
These are shown at handover and written into the tenant's note, and they are worth finding again now rather than during the event. The stopcock, which stops the water: usually under the kitchen sink, sometimes in a hall cupboard or under the bath panel. The consumer unit, which is the fuse board: its position and which way the main switch moves. The meters, gas and electricity, and whether they are inside or in a communal cupboard.
If there is a smell of gas, do not use switches or phones in the room: open the windows, turn the supply off at the meter if it is reachable, leave, and call the national gas emergency line. Tell this office afterwards, not first. For a leak that is running, the stopcock comes before the email.
The order jobs are taken in
Four lanes, and a job is put in one of them when it is read rather than when it is convenient. The lane is written on the log entry, so it is always visible why one job moved before another.
- Make safe. Anything involving gas, exposed wiring, a running leak, no heating in cold weather, a door or window that will not secure. The object is to remove the danger, which is not always the same as completing the repair.
- Same visit. Small work that one trade can finish in one attendance with what is on the van.
- Ordered parts. The job is held open with the order reference and the expected date on the entry, and the tenant is told both.
- Planned. Work that is better done with other work, or in the right season — external decoration, a replacement that is not yet urgent, anything needing scaffold or consent.
Access: notice, attendance, keys
Access is arranged, not assumed. A visit is agreed with the occupier and confirmed in writing with the trade, the reason and the window, and at least twenty-four hours ahead except where the job is a make-safe one and the occupier has asked for it sooner. If a trade cannot keep the window, the occupier hears that from this office rather than discovering it.
Keys held for a property are tagged by number and never by address, kept in the cabinet at the office, signed out to a named contractor and signed back the same day. A key that does not come back is a lock change, and the entry in the log says so.
What the log records, per job
One line per job, and the line is not closed until it has a closing date on it. The entry holds the job number, the date reported and by whom, the property reference, the room, the description in the reporter's own words, the lane it was put in, the trade attending, the dates of attendance, the parts ordered with their reference, the action taken, and the date closed. Where a job is carried into the next year in December, the reason is written beside it rather than left blank.
The reporter's own words are kept because they are evidence. A summary written later tends to describe what was found instead of what was reported, and the two are not the same thing.
Damp and condensation: readings, not adjectives
Damp is the one report that is always worth measuring. A reading, the room, the wall, the weather that week and whether the patch is at skirting level or at the ceiling will distinguish a leak from a cold bridge from condensation, and an adjective will not. Readings are taken at the same points at every visit so the February note can be compared with the November one.
Where the cause is condensation, the answer is heating pattern, ventilation and the trickle vents, and that is written to the tenant as a method rather than as a complaint. Where the cause is a defect, it goes into the make-safe or planned lane on its merits.