The seniors’ building at 1041 Wellington street received a face lift thanks to a $890,000 renovation. 

The work includes new outer walls, restoration of windows and balcony doors, and new exhaust fans for the bathrooms.  

The work is now complete. 

HOW WAS THE BUILDING SELECTED? 

Ottawa Community Housing’s Asset Management team has an Asset Planner tool that keeps track of the installation and maintenance dates of key systems in all OCH buildings, aside from windows and doors; we also track the age of things like heating, units, boilers and elevators. 

The windows and balcony doors were installed in 1998 and it was time for them to be replaced.  

HOW WAS THE WORK DONE?  

Because aluminum does not corrode over time, the window frames are thus still in good condition and workers are able to leave the window frames in and replace the weatherstripping and the framing seals. The smaller windows to the left of the balcony door are brand new.  

The new bathroom fans are humidity sensing which means they turn on once the humidity levels in a room go above a certain relative humidity level.  

Workers can complete the window repairs and installations in three hours, which means they completed roughly four homes per day. The building has a total of 198 homes. 

EXTERIOR CLADDING 

The exterior cladding forms the outer shell of the building. At 1041 Wellington, the exterior cladding is made up of large precast concrete panels.  The sealant (caulking) between the concrete panels, as well as around all windows and other elements on the building exterior, needed to be replaced. This is done with an elevator swing stage, which is anchored on the buildings’ roof and allows workers to go down the outer wall and replace caulking. The work took about a week per vertical drop.