How long does it take to do an office fitout in Melbourne?
The Short Answer:
The first 1- 2 weeks is spent in understanding the design and preparing all the costings. We use historical costings to give you a rock solid, fixed quote which doesn’t suddenly blow out halfway through the project. The next two weeks are spent in interior design and confirming all the finishes and finalising the building permit specifics and waiting for the building permit to be released. On average, time on site is 6- 8 weeks and it is ready for you to move in.
The Long Answer:
From the first meeting we walk through on-site to measure up, and to get a grip of the space and your vision. We get an understanding of what it is you need to achieve within the space and how you’re going to grow your business and transform work lives.
The first stage can take one to 1.5 weeks, in which time we establish the brief for the design team to work with. This means that we can really zero in so the team can start working on it and ensure that we can achieve everything the business needs to move forward. Then there may be a couple of days in revisions to allow for you and your team’s feedback. 1 –2 weeks is the typical duration of the first stage assuming everyone’s happy and the budget costings are nailed within that time as well.
While the design team are working their magic, exact costs are being established using historical costings and a lot of costing modelling, to give you a rock solid, accurate quote. This ensures we don’t blow out your budget and we achieve your business objectives and investment ratios.
After the contract is signed, Stage 2 commences. This stage can be extended if you need a few weeks to sort out finance or something like that.
During this stage, we work on building permit drawings and lodge the building permit, which is being processed in the background while our design team works with you on the Finishes Schedule. This document establishes colours, material selections, furniture selections etc. This typically runs concurrently with the building permit within that 2 weeks so that we can start on site the day we receive the permit.
Something to note is that we find we run into significant delays during Finishes, particularly with owner-occupied tenancies who want to spend a of lot time on a granular level of detail within the Finishes Schedule, e.g. the exact kitchen handle, the exact texture of the tile, exact size of tile etc. This can push the whole project out several weeks. Larger companies tend to say we trust your design team implicitly and we love what you’ve come up with, which means the finishes stage can be contained within the 2 weeks.
We must also have a form called Owners Consent signed before we can start on site. This gives us permission to do works and this can lead to delays if the owner of the building is an overseas investor and can’t be contacted for a signature.
The actual build part of the project is mostly 6- 8 weeks. This could be a 200sqm office or a 1000sqm office. Larger sites enable bigger teams and more works to happen concurrently, whereas at smaller sites, we have to stage the works out. Bizarrely, a 100sqm fitout is no faster than a 100sqm fitout.
Variables which impact the 6- 8 weeks build time can be fire services, specifically in high-rise shopping centres or multi-level hospitals where we might have to satisfy and/or may have to use external engineers to certify the design drawings, for the building management to approve us to go on site.
If you can provide us access to the landlord’s managing agent or the landlord, we can discover a lot of that stuff up front, so it doesn’t pose a delay. Sometimes we’ve had projects go outside the 6- 8 weeks when there needs to be exterior works. For example, fire services brought in from underneath the street or roof rectification etc. 6- 8 weeks is a good indication for a lot of scope for most projects.
If you’re looking to transform your workplace, we’d love to take you through the process and show how intelligent design can create a very clever, but not expensive, result which allows you to transform your teams’ work life, in turn creating a more productive, sustainable business for you.