Late 1960s brickwork is the first thing we look at on a Cook callout. The suburb was gazetted in 1968 and the housing that went up then sits on mortar that has now had close to sixty Canberra winters through it. It holds a fixing until it starts to move, and once it starts it goes quickly. Almost every shutter in Cook was retrofitted rather than fitted at build, so the bracket is doing work the wall was never asked to do. That is where most of what we repair here actually begins.
We cover all of Cook in the 2614 postcode, from the streets around the community hub through to the reserve boundary on the southern side. Aranda, Macquarie and Weetangera adjoin the suburb, and Page, Hawker and Scullin are minutes away, so we group work across this part of Belconnen.
Consistent housing stock from a single construction period, with shutters added decades afterwards.
Refitting a shutter to an old wall properly means using an anchor suited to soft mortar and spreading the load rather than relying on a couple of screws. Done that way it holds. Done the quick way it will be back on our list in a few years. If your shutter has started to feel like it is moving against the wall when it runs, that is the moment to have it looked at, because the longer it moves the more it damages the brickwork behind it.
