Anyone who works on buildings for a living will eventually damage one. A brittle tile that cracks under a foot placed exactly where it should have been placed. A light fitting that was already failing. A pot knocked by a hose being dragged.
The claim to never damage anything is not a claim about skill, it is a claim about volume or about honesty. What actually distinguishes operators is the ten minutes after it happens.
What should happen, in order
Work stops in that area. Immediately, before anything is moved or tidied. A cracked tile that gets walked on another four times becomes a different problem.
It gets photographed as it is. Before any attempt to fix it, from several angles, with enough context to show location. If it is a water ingress issue, the inside gets photographed too.
You are told the same day. Not at the end of the week, not in the invoice, not discovered by you a fortnight later.
That last one is the whole thing. Nearly every dispute in this trade is not about the damage, it is about the delay in disclosure — because a homeowner who finds it themselves has to wonder what else they were not told.
Why the before shots decide these conversations
This is where the photo report earns its place, and it protects both sides.
Cleaning reveals problems far more often than it causes them. Clear a gutter packed with compacted leaf litter and water may now reach a perforation that debris was plugging. Remove moss from a roof and the cracked tile it was covering is visible. Strip growth from a post base and the rust that was hidden is obvious.
In each case the homeowner sees a defect that was not visible yesterday, and the natural conclusion is that the cleaner caused it. Without a photograph taken before the work, that is an argument nobody can resolve fairly.
It cuts the other way too. If something was genuinely sound in the before shot and is damaged in the after, that is ours and the photo says so. More: what is in our photo report and rusting gutters.
The honest grey area
Some things sit genuinely in between, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
A forty-year-old terracotta tile that cracks under normal careful foot traffic was already at the end of its service life. The work was the occasion, not really the cause. Same with a brittle plastic downpipe bracket that snaps when touched, or a perished seal that fails when water reaches it.
Our position on those is straightforward: we say so plainly, we show you the condition of the surrounding material, and we do not try to win the argument. Replacing a handful of tiles on a roof where that was always going to happen is a cost of doing the work properly, not a negotiation.
The alternative — refusing to walk any aged roof at all — is sometimes the right answer, and when it is, we say that at quoting stage instead. More: does roof cleaning damage tiles and the jobs we turn down.
What gets fixed directly and what goes to insurance
Small things get fixed. A cracked tile replaced, a bracket renewed, a damaged plant replaced, a fitting repaired by the right trade. Arguing about a hundred-dollar item is worse for everyone than simply dealing with it.
Larger damage goes to public liability, and that is what the cover exists for. We carry $20m. Worth understanding, though, that liability insurance covers damage to property — it does not generally cover the cost of redoing work that was performed badly, which comes from us directly.
More: what public liability covers and the gaps.
The damage that shows up later
Not everything appears on the day, which is why we tell you what to watch for.
Water driven into a wall cavity through a weep hole or a tired window seal shows as damp plaster inside a week or two later. Chlorine on planting shows as leaf burn three to five days afterwards. A disturbed roof tile shows at the next heavy rain, not the next drizzle. A sealer applied over trapped moisture clouds as it cures.
If any of that appears in the fortnight after a job, call — the timeline makes it ours to look at. More: weep holes and subfloor vents and the first 48 hours.
Your position, regardless of what was signed
Under the Australian Consumer Law, services must be supplied with due care and skill. That guarantee cannot be excluded by a clause in a quote, and a term disclaiming all responsibility for damage caused by the operator’s own method does not survive it.
So if someone pressure washes render off a wall and points at their terms, the terms are not the end of it. The ACCC sets out the guarantees, and NSW Fair Trading handles disputes that cannot be resolved directly.
What to do if it happens to you with anyone
Photograph it immediately and date it. Put the issue in writing rather than only by phone, so there is a record. Ask for the certificate of currency and the insurer’s details. Do not accept a repair by someone unqualified for that trade — a cleaner should not be doing your electrical or roofing remediation.
And if the response is to go quiet, that tells you what the guarantee on their website was worth.
Why we would rather not need any of this
Insurance pays after the fact. It does not restore etched sandstone, a stripped roof coating or a heritage lime mortar joint, because those cannot be bought back.
Which is the argument for method, protection and a test patch — the boring parts of the job that exist so this post stays theoretical. More: why we do a test patch.
