Hotel and apartment renovations while the property stays open

At seven in the morning on an occupied hotel floor, the first thing we check is not the drywall. It is the hallway: is the plastic wall up, is the carpet runner taped down, is the elevator we are allowed to use the one that is padded. The guests on the floor below had a night's sleep to protect, and the front desk sold those rooms at full rate. The renovation is our job. Keeping the property earning while we do it is the whole job.

The stacking plan is the schedule

Before a single door gets taken off, the owner and the general manager sit with us and mark up a stacking plan. Which floors come out of inventory and in what order. Which weeks the property has a group in house that cannot be moved. Which weeks the occupancy forecast dips and can absorb more rooms offline. On an apartment community the same exercise runs by building and by lease expiration: a vacant unit is money out the door every day, so we turn units in the order they come empty and stop turning when the leasing office says the pipeline is full.

The phasing plan is not a courtesy. It is the schedule. A principal of our company builds it, and that same person is on the property while it runs, so when the general manager needs a floor back two days early for a wedding block, the person who can answer is already standing in the corridor.

Noise, dust and the elevator

Guests do not care about our sequence. They care about whether the hammer drill starts at eight or at ten. We set quiet hours with the property and we keep them. Demolition and any work that shakes the slab runs inside the window the property gives us. Anything that can be cut in the staging area instead of the room gets cut there. Dust barriers go up at the corridor, not at the room door, so the finished side of the floor stays clean enough for housekeeping to work.

One elevator becomes the construction car. It gets padded, it gets a schedule and it gets a rule: no materials in the guest cars, ever. On a garden-style apartment property the equivalent is the breezeway and the parking lot. Residents need their spaces and their path to the mailbox, so our laydown area is fenced and the dumpsters go where the property manager says, not where the driver prefers.

Protecting finished rooms from the next phase

Occupied renovations finish in slices, which means yesterday's completed corridor is next to today's demolition. We treat every turned-over area as a customer's room from that moment. Floor protection stays down until the last trade is out of the adjacent zone. New doors and hardware get wrapped. Our own crews handle the framing, drywall, paint, tile and millwork in those rooms, so the people setting the vanity are the same people who will be blamed for the scratch on it, and that keeps everyone careful.

The reopening date is the only date

A PIP comes with a brand deadline and a hotel comes with a revenue calendar. Neither one moves for us. So we manage backwards from the date each floor returns to inventory: furniture and FF&E delivery scheduled to the floor, case goods staged off site until the room is ready to receive them, punch walked by the owner of our company with the general manager before the room is released, not after. If a room is not ready, it does not go back. If the floor is ready early, it goes back early, and the property earns on it.

Apartment turns work the same way in miniature. Move-in dates are promised to real people who have hired movers. Our job is that the keys work on that day and the unit looks like the model.

We run occupied renovations with the owner of the company on the property, phase by phase, until the last floor is back in service. Send over the PIP or the unit turn scope and we will build the phasing plan around your calendar.