Eleven questions to ask a contractor before they work in your occupied building
Occupied renovation is a different discipline from ground-up construction, and a firm can be excellent at one and genuinely poor at the other. These are the questions that tell them apart.
- How many occupied projects have you completed in this building type, and can I call those owners?
- Who negotiates shutdown windows, and how far ahead?
- What containment class will you hold, and who verifies it?
- How do you route construction traffic away from the people using the building?
- What happens to your schedule when we refuse a shutdown window?
- Who is on site overnight, and what are they authorised to decide?
- How will you monitor noise and vibration, and against what limits?
- What is your plan when the fire alarm has to be isolated?
- How do you handle a subcontractor who breaches the site rules?
- What did you get wrong on your last occupied job?
- Will the superintendent in this room be the one on my site?
The one that matters most
The tenth. Any firm can describe a process. A firm that has actually done this work will have a specific answer about something that went wrong, and how they found out. A firm that says nothing went wrong has either not done it or is not telling you.