Owner guides
What the building is telling you
Diagnostic guides for owners. Each one takes a symptom you can see and works back to the causes, including the tests you can run yourself before anyone is called.
Most owners are not on site. A photograph arrives, a decision has to be made, and the gap between the cheap version of a repair and the expensive one is usually a few days of knowing what to look at. These guides close that gap. They are written to be useful whether or not you ever call us.
/ 01 · Water & damp
The stain below the bathroom is almost never the roof
Five things cause a brown patch on a ceiling under a bathroom. They are not equally expensive, and telling them apart takes about a day of doing nothing.
4 min read
/ 02 · Cooling & AC
Your AC is running. The room is still warm.
Two very different faults look identical from the doorway, and one of them is not the machine at all. One measurement separates them.
4 min read
/ 03 · Structure & facade
Not every crack is structural. Here is how to read yours.
The width of a crack tells you very little. Its pattern, its direction and whether it is moving tell you almost everything.
5 min read
Not sure which one you're looking at?
Send a photograph and a sentence about where it is. We have looked after buildings in Bahrain since 1987, and most of these are recognisable from a picture.