Sandstone cleaning in Bondi Junction

Bondi Junction is the commercial heart of the Waverley area and home to the council's administrative centre. Westfield Bondi Junction faces the underground railway station and bus interchange, and the Oxford Street Mall runs between Bronte Road and Newland Street. About 65 per cent of occupied homes are flats or apartments, most of them in the high-rise blocks close to the shops. Step a few streets out and the suburb changes. Grafton Street and Nelson Street hold Victorian and Federation terraces and large houses behind sandstone walls with cast iron palisade fences, and Mill Hill has narrow terrace rows and worker cottages. The state-listed Waverley Reservoirs stand on Paul Street. Stone here means apartment podiums and paths, terrace steps, and old retaining walls.

Two different sets of problems meet in this suburb. In the centre, sandstone and stone paving around apartment entries pick up diesel soot from the bus interchange, chewing gum, coffee and the grime of constant foot traffic, and tall buildings keep podium gardens in shade so planters drip and grow algae onto the paving below. On the residential fringes, the issues are older ones: retaining walls and front steps more than a century old, patched with hard cement over time, damp at the base and blackened by lichen under street trees. Bondi Junction sits back from the coast on a ridge, so sea salt is a lesser factor than traffic, shade and age (inferred from setting rather than measured).

Waverley Council's heritage inventory places at least four conservation areas in Bondi Junction: Grafton Street, Mill Hill, Botany Street and Woodstock Street, together covering a good part of the late Victorian and Federation housing around the centre. Clause 5.10 of the local plan generally makes works to listed items and to buildings inside these areas subject to development consent, unless Waverley has agreed in writing that a particular task counts as minor and harmless to significance. Check with Waverley before restoration, repointing or applying any new sealer. In the apartment towers, external paving and podium stone are almost always common property, so the owners corporation decides, and altering that common property, as opposed to maintaining it, can call for a special resolution of owners (section 108).

From Double Bay to Bondi Junction is about a ten-minute drive, which makes the suburb straightforward for staged strata jobs that run across several visits. Parking and loading are the main logistics. We agree access to a building's loading dock or visitor bays with the building manager, or book a nearby space, before arriving. On busy frontages we start early, cordon the work area and keep pedestrians on a clear, dry route. Terrace houses in the Mill Hill and Grafton Street areas usually mean carrying equipment through the house or down a rear lane, so we bring floor protection. Rinse water is caught with mats and a wet vacuum, never swept into the gutter.