Annexe Refurbishment at St Mary’s School, Prittlewell

Dec 12, 2016 | Building, Case Studies, News

Recently Blake Contractors were asked to quote Southend Borough Council for an annexe refurbishment at the East Street site for St Mary’s School, Prittlewell.

The job was for a complete refurbishment to the old school building which had been almost empty for years.

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St Mary's classroom before your reliable building contractors in Essex

Classroom before Blake’s expert tradesmen worked their magic

Classroom after Blake’s

Blake’s were asked to provide a tender and, once we had won this, we also completed a “valued engineering” with the school and the client. This is where we suggest ways the client could save money. Seven days later, we started the job.

The original schedule was divided into sections.

First, we completed the internal and structural works plus the playground area within 11 weeks so that the school could open as planned.

The second part of the job was to complete some external construction works including tarmacking the driveway. Originally, this was scheduled to take place within the following half term when the kids were to be off again.

However the school was concerned about this… so we offered to have all the works completed within the time scale of section 1. Now that’s a happy working relationship for you!

Over the 11 weeks we had between 20-30 employees on site every day, including some weekends, to make sure that we could get this finished in time.

We managed this, despite unforeseen changes having to be made along the way to give the school what they needed.

The refurbishment was made up of various individual jobs, including:

decorating
installation of toilets

The toilet block was in a shocking state before

Toilet block after some much-needed care and attention from Blake’s building crew

installation of a commercial kitchen
white rock
suspended ceilings
plastering & rendering
removal of structural walls
DDA works
concrete repairs
brickwork repairs
new roofing systems and roof light
parquet flooring strip and re-polish

Playground safe and ready for children after Blake’s building works

tarmac
rubber crumb
fencing
new windows and doors
refurbish old crittall windows

Dangerous window before

Safe window fit for use after Blake’s attention

The company providing the specification and acting as contract administrator for the job was John Burke Associates of Romford and here’s what they had to say about this project:

Working with Blakes was a pleasure. Unforeseen variations were notified along with suggested solutions and were very reasonably priced first time. Interim claims for payment were fair. The Blake management were always on hand with good suggestions for the works. Blake completed within the programme and within the budget to a very good standard of finish. I / we would welcome working with Blake again.

Chris Medcalf

Senior Building Surveyor, John Burke Associates, Romford, Essex

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