Ninety six windows on the elevations, counted from the street and counted off the drawings and billed for every month. Ninety four if you go in and count them from the rooms.
I have a window cleaning round and about a third of it is commercial, which mostly means blocks of flats for managing agents.
The count is the job. You price a block by counting windows off the elevations and then you check it on the first visit, because a drawing is a drawing and a building is a building, and then that number is in the contract and on every invoice for as long as you have the work.
Mine is a 1936 block, four storeys, six flats a floor, twenty four flats. Communal windows on the stair as well.
Ninety six. That is what I counted from the pavement on all four elevations in 2014, and it is what the drawings give, and it is what I have invoiced every month for eleven years.
In 2021 the agent changed and the new one wanted everything re-verified, which is reasonable and which I welcomed, because a new agent checking the numbers usually means they are going to pay on time.
Their surveyor did it from inside. He went into every flat with the residents' permission over two days and counted windows per room, which is a more accurate way to do it than standing in the road, and is the way you would do it if you wanted to be sure.
He came back with ninety four.
So we had a discrepancy of two and a contract that said ninety six, and the agent's position was that I had been overbilling by two windows a month since 2014, which at my rate is not a lot of money and is a very big accusation.
I went and counted again from the street. Four elevations, on my own, with a clicker, three times over a fortnight.
Ninety six. Every time.
Then I did it his way. I arranged with the agent to go into the flats with him, and we did it together over one long Saturday, and we counted ninety four, and we agreed on ninety four, and I was standing next to him for every room.
Here is what you do then, because it is obvious. You find which two.
We went round the outside and photographed every window on every elevation, numbered, in order. Ninety six photographs.
Then we went inside and matched them off. Flat by flat, room by room. This window is the kitchen of flat 7. This one is the bedroom of flat 11.
Ninety four of them matched.
Two did not.
They are on the rear elevation, second floor, towards the left hand end as you look at it.
They are two ordinary windows. Steel framed, the original 1936 Crittall type that most of the block still has, the same size and the same pattern as the ones either side of them, with the same paint, the same putty, the same light grime in the corners of the panes.
Inside, on the second floor towards that end, there is flat 13 and flat 14. Flat 13's bedroom has one window on that elevation and flat 14's bathroom has one. We matched both of those to photographs.
The two spare ones are between them, in the run, evenly spaced with everything else, and behind them there is nothing. The party wall between 13 and 14 is there, and on the 1936 drawings and on the current floor plans there is a wall and then another wall and a void of about forty centimetres between them that is a service void for the soil stack.
You cannot fit a window in forty centimetres, and from the outside those two are in the same plane as all the others and the reveal is the same depth, which I have measured with a tape on a pole.
Things we did next, and the agent paid for some of it, which I will always give him credit for.
A measured survey of that elevation. A proper one with a laser, by a firm. The report has the two windows on it, at their measured positions, and a note from the surveyor saying that the internal layout does not correspond and recommending an intrusive investigation.
An endoscope through the party wall from flat 13's bedroom, which the leaseholder allowed because she had become as interested as we were. Eight millimetre hole, at the height of the window, at the horizontal position the survey gave.
The camera came out into a void. Not a room. The void is about forty centimetres as the drawings say, brick one side and brick the other, and it goes up and down out of sight of a little camera on a cable.
There is no window in it. The camera was looking at brick where the outside of the building is.
I clean them.
That is the part that I think about when I think about this, which is not often any more, because eleven years is a long time and you get used to anything.
They are on the pole work from the ground, because the whole rear elevation is, and they get the same as every other window: brush, water, squeegee.
They get dirty. That is not nothing. A window that is sealed into brickwork with no room behind it gets dirty on the outside like any other window, which it would, because the outside is the outside.
But twice, in eleven years, those two have been dirty on the inside. You can tell. The marks do not come off and the light goes through them differently, and I have stood in the car park looking up at them with the pole in my hand and seen smears on the wrong side of the glass.
The contract.
The agent settled it in 2022 in the only way that was available to anybody. The schedule now says ninety four windows plus two non accessible lights to the rear elevation, which is a phrase he invented and which I agreed to, and I am paid for ninety six.
That sentence has been in two sets of service charge accounts and nobody has ever asked what it means.
And I still do the rear elevation last, which started as a habit about the route round the building and is not that any more, because I do it last so that when I have finished those two I am walking away from them rather than past them.