Building Fabric Survey of a Stucco Terrace

Close range drone inspection of a stucco terrace, recording chimney stacks, lead flats, cornice and rainwater goods at a detail no ground survey reaches.

The parts of a terrace that fail first are the parts nobody can see. Lead flats behind a parapet, the flaunching on a chimney stack, the back gutter where a pitch meets a party wall, the hopper head at the top of a cast iron downpipe. All of it sits above the cornice line, out of sight from the street and out of reach without a scaffold or a cherry picker. This survey recorded that zone across a stucco terrace in a single visit. The frames run from a full overhead of the roof, which gives the slate coverage and the position of every stack and pot, down to close details of individual elements: the moulded cornice with its cast iron hopper, the flaunching around a stack, the junction where a lead flat meets the slate pitch. Working this close to a building is a different discipline from surveying an open roof. The aircraft is operating within a few metres of masonry, in the turbulence that comes off a wall on a warm day, with the pilot flying to a plan agreed before take off rather than improvising. It is also the reason the detail is usable: from twenty metres away you get a photograph of a roof, and from three you get a record of its condition. No scaffold, no access equipment, no work at height, and the residents were not disturbed. Frames that looked into windows were discarded rather than delivered.