01First this question: who keeps the time in this building?
We set out the general rules of the site in our article on scheduling work: wet trades first, the critical path, ordering backwards, the weekly promise. Those hold everywhere. But in every building type a “master clock” sits on top of the programme, and all decisions are taken by it. A programme that misreads that clock does not hold, however flawless it is on paper.
This distinction has a history too. The critical path, the best known of the planning methods, was developed in the 1950s to shorten maintenance shutdowns in the plants of a chemical company. That is, the modern programme of works was born of the question “what is the shortest time this plant can stay closed?”. All the headings below are another form of the same question.
02The home: the clock is the owner’s life
Who keeps the time: the moving day, the end of the tenancy, the opening of school, the birth of a baby.
What is decisive: the number of decisions. In a home there are hundreds of small choices, and a single family makes all of them. A housing site is late because of decisions more than because of material. That is why the programme carries the dates of the choices beside those of the tasks: tiles on this day, fittings on this day, kitchen measurement on this day.
A common mistake: putting the moving day on the day the final coat of paint is finished. At least a week is needed for cleaning, furniture assembly, curtains, the snagging list, that is, the final check before handover, and airing. A home moved into before the smell of paint and varnish has gone loses its first impression.
In an apartment building: working hours, use of the lift and removal of rubble are agreed with the management in writing at the start. A relationship with a neighbour that has gone wrong can stop the site for days with one complaint.
03The office: the clock is the moving weekend
Who keeps the time: the end of the lease on the old office, and the fact that the company cannot pause its work. The move is very often fitted into a single weekend; on Monday morning everyone’s computer must work.
What is decisive: the infrastructure that is not seen. Data cables, the cooling of the server room, the transfer of the internet line, uninterrupted power. The connection of the line is very often not in the hands of the site and can take weeks; that is why it is applied for on the first day. Furniture is the second critical item: the lead time of made-to-order desks and partition systems can be longer than the construction itself.
In an office tower: noisy work and the carrying of material are generally tied to out-of-office hours and to the booking of the goods lift. On a site with the right to two hours of lift a day, the programme is built around those two hours.
Refurbishment in a working office: it advances section by section; at each stage one team is moved to a temporary place. The dust screen, night work and a clean handover every morning are as important as the work itself. How an office is planned is the subject of a separate article.
04The shop: the clock is the rent and the opening announcement
Who keeps the time: rent runs from the first day, and the opening date is very often announced in advance. That is why shop sites are short and intense: they are measured in weeks.
What is decisive: the workshop. Because the time on site is short, most of the work is produced elsewhere and only installed in place. Counters, shelves, the shop window and the sign arrive ready. This makes it essential that dimensions are fixed in the first week; if a dimension changes on site, everything produced in the workshop changes.
In a shopping centre: work is mostly done at night, material enters at set hours and through set doors, and the management has a technical specification and an approval process. Because changes to sprinklers and fire detection are connected to the centre’s system, their calendar comes ahead of yours.
A common mistake: leaving no time for placing the goods and training the staff. A shop does not open on the day the site finishes; days are needed for the shelves to fill.
05The restaurant: the clock is the kitchen
Who keeps the time: rent and opening. Restaurants are very often ventures with limited capital; every week spent closed is a direct loss.
What is decisive: the kitchen equipment and the extraction hood. The dining room of a restaurant is furniture, whereas its kitchen is a plant: gas, high-current electricity, hot and cold water, a grease trap, falls to the drains and, most important, the flue. How the hood duct will leave the building is a question that has to be solved even before the decision to rent. A grill restaurant cannot be opened in premises from which a duct cannot be taken up to the roof.
Sequence: floor and services do not begin before the list and layout of the kitchen equipment are final, because the drain, socket and gas point of each appliance are left according to its position. A floor whose outlet is in the wrong place when the equipment arrives is a floor that is broken up.
Permits: steps such as gas commissioning, the fire brigade and the business licence are not under the control of the site and ask for their own lines in the programme.
Before opening: trial services. The kitchen team learns the appliances, the ventilation is tried with the room full, and the acoustics are tested for the first time with real noise. This one week is the most valuable week of the programme; if it is shortened, the faults appear in front of the first customer.
06The hotel: the clock is the season and repetition
Who keeps the time: the season. The coastal hotel looks to summer, the ski hotel to winter, and the city hotel to the calendar of fairs and congresses. A hotel that misses the season misses a year.
What is decisive: repetition. In a hotel the same room is built hundreds of times, and this is both the greatest opportunity and the greatest risk. A small fault in one room is a hundred faults in a hundred rooms. That is why a sample room is first finished completely: the client, the operator and the craftsmen see every detail in that room, corrections are made, and only then does the series begin.
Rhythm: the teams follow the floors in turn. As the services installer leaves a floor the plasterboard fixer enters, after him the painter, and then the furniture. If each team stays an equal time on a floor, the building flows like a conveyor. The ancestor of this arrangement is the famous New York skyscraper that rose four and a half storeys a week in 1930.
Furniture and fittings: beds, carpets, curtains, lighting and bathroom fittings are very often a separate contract and come by ship. Customs and transport times are inside the programme. If the rooms are finished and the furniture is waiting at the port, the hotel cannot open.
Renovation in a working hotel: it is done floor by floor or wing by wing; the floors below and above the one being worked on are very often closed to sale as well. Noise is made only in the hours when the guest is not in the room. The room revenue lost is an item of the site cost, and decisions to speed up are taken accordingly.
07The school: the clock is the bell
Who keeps the time: the academic calendar. The opening day of a school cannot be postponed; this is the strictest handover date among all building types.
What is decisive: the summer window. For refurbishment there are about ten to twelve weeks in hand, and this time begins on the day the last examination ends. That is why on a school site the months before summer are more important than summer itself: all decisions, orders, workshop fabrication and permits must be finished before June arrives. A school that decides in June opens in September with a building site.
Sequence: noisy and dusty work in the first weeks, wet areas and floors in the middle, painting and installation at the end. The last two weeks are for cleaning, airing and furniture; no smell of paint or adhesive should remain in a space children will enter.
Work during term: if it cannot be avoided it is divided over weekends and holidays, the working area is physically separated from the pupils, and material and vehicles enter outside lesson hours. In a building where children are present, safety measures are one degree stricter than on any other site.
08The hospital: the clock never stops
Who keeps the time: the patient. A hospital cannot be closed; the work is done inside a working building. This is the most difficult site in this article.
What is decisive: dust, vibration and interruption. Construction dust makes a healthy person cough; in a patient with weak immunity it can lead to serious infections. That is why, before work begins, a risk assessment is made together with the hospital’s infection control team. The working area is closed off up to the ceiling, and the air inside is kept at a lower pressure than outside so that dust goes to the filter and not to the corridor. Rubble is taken out in closed trolleys and by a set route.
Interruptions: every interruption to electricity, water, medical gas or ventilation is planned hour by hour with the wards concerned, days in advance. The oxygen line of intensive care cannot be closed “for half an hour”; a temporary line is installed first.
Vibration and noise: while a breaker is working, the imaging equipment or the operation in the next room may be affected. Noisy work is tied to hours agreed with the wards and is carried out ready to be stopped at any moment.
Handover: in a hospital the work does not end with the final coat of paint. The balancing of the ventilation, the measurement of pressure differences, medical gas tests, the validation of clean areas and the commissioning of equipment take weeks. If this period is not written into the programme from the start, a “finished” operating theatre cannot be used for months.
Why is a hospital refurbishment several times longer and more expensive than an office of the same size? Because half of the work there is invisible: dust screens, pressure measurements, night shifts, temporary lines, step-by-step interruption plans. None of these is seen in the finished space, but all are inside the programme and the budget. Whoever gives a cheap and quick bid has generally not counted this half.
09The factory: the clock is the production line
Who keeps the time: the shutdown. In a working factory every hour the line stops has a price, and this price is very often greater than the daily cost of the site. That is why the work is fitted into planned shutdowns (public holidays, annual maintenance, between shifts) and is planned by the hour and not by the day.
What is decisive: the floor and the machine. An industrial floor is not an ordinary screed: the load it will carry, its flatness, its joints and its coating are calculated for the production. Resin-based coatings are applied within a set range of temperature and humidity and need to cure for days before a forklift goes onto them. If this time is shortened, the floor fails in the first month.
The sequence is set by the machine: the foundations, anchors, power and compressed-air points of large machines are prepared from the machine’s own drawing. The machine very often comes from abroad and its delivery date is fixed; the building has to be ready for that day. A machine waiting under a late roof burns money every day.
In a working plant: the site area is physically separated from production. A separate permit is obtained for work that produces sparks, such as welding and cutting. In fields such as food and pharmaceuticals, dust and foreign matter ask for a care close to that of the hospital.
Commissioning: a factory is handed over not when the building is finished but when the line gives product. Trial production is the last and most uncertain item of the programme.
10Side by side
| Building | Who keeps the time | Most critical item | Working pattern | The moment the work ends |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | Moving day | Decisions | By day, according to the neighbours | When smell and dust have gone |
| Office | Moving weekend | Data infrastructure, furniture | Out of hours, according to the lift | When everyone is working on Monday |
| Shop | Rent, opening announcement | Workshop fabrication | At night, by the centre’s rules | When the shelves are full |
| Restaurant | Rent, opening | Kitchen and flue | By day, depending on permits | After the trial service |
| Hotel | Season | Sample room, furniture shipment | Floor by floor, in rhythm | After the trial stays |
| School | First day of lessons | Orders placed before summer | Without interruption through the summer | In an aired classroom |
| Hospital | The patient; it never stops | Control of dust and interruption | Section by section, hour by hour | After measurement and validation |
| Factory | Planned shutdown | Floor, machine foundation | By the hour, in shifts | When the line gives product |
11The common lesson: the more “alive” the building, the larger the invisible work
In an empty flat the site does only its own work. In a working hospital, by contrast, half of the work is protecting the rest of the building from the site. This invisible half is the real source of the difference in cost and time between building types, and it is the first place to look when comparing bids.
The second common lesson is the definition of the end. In no building type does the work end with the final coat of paint. In the home it ends when the smell has gone, in the restaurant when the trial service has passed, in the hotel when the first guest has slept, in the factory when the first product has come off the line. If the last line of the programme is “paint”, that programme is incomplete.
The third comes from the past. A hundred years ago buildings were built while empty and used when finished. Today a large part of the work in cities is renovation carried out inside living buildings; because land has become scarce, buildings have aged and businesses cannot afford to stop. That is why site management means less and less “to build” and more and more “to change without disturbing”. These headings follow the building types we have worked in since 2014; the first thing we learnt in each was to ask who keeps the clock of that building.