Organising access to dwellings on an occupied refurbishment
On an occupied refurbishment, the schedule does not run into a shortage of means, it runs into closed doors. Three shut dwellings in one stairwell are enough to bring a full crew back a second time, for three hours of work. Access is therefore the resource to manage, ahead of labour and ahead of materials.
This article is part of the guide
Works in occupied buildingsThe bottleneck is not where you look for it
A new-build site is run by trade: painting follows plastering, the crew moves from one floor to the next. In an occupied building, the unit is no longer the trade, it is the dwelling. Each dwelling is a miniature site with its own door, its own occupant, its own hours.
The consequence is mechanical: an access rate of 80% does not cost 20% of the time, it costs a great deal more. The missed dwellings are scattered, they force a return to a whole stairwell for a handful of jobs, with the same setting-up and packing-up time. That is the figure to watch every evening, before progress itself.
Give notice: by name, and with a reply
A collective notice in the lobby commits nobody and proves nothing. The visit notice is individual: occupant's name, dwelling number, exact nature of the job, dates, time slot, and a contact reachable during the works.
The part that matters is the reply slip. It offers three boxes, and those three boxes are exactly the three possible outcomes: I will be in, I am leaving my key, I refuse the work. A slip returned the evening before beats a closed door the next morning: the schedule line moves before the crew does, not after.
Keys: a register, not a pocket
Key handover is what saves a schedule: the tenant goes to work, the contractor lets itself in, the job gets done. But the key has to be findable. A named register says who handed over what, to whom, on which day, and when the key came back.
Two field rules are worth writing down. The key goes back to the tenant, never to a neighbour or to the caretaker without the tenant's written agreement. And a key not returned by the end of the day is flagged that same evening, not the next morning: a lost set discovered on day two means a new cylinder, a set flagged at six is almost always in a toolbox.
What gets decided on the doorstep
The crew is at the door with three minutes to work out what happens. If the tenant opens and the job goes ahead, they leave with a signed waiver. If the tenant refuses, they leave with a signed refusal stating what was refused and why. If the room has not been cleared, they leave with a signed disclaimer or they do not work.
What you must not do is leave with nothing and "write it up back at the office". A visit with no record is a visit that never happened once the client asks for an account, and it is also the one that reappears in the schedule with nobody knowing why.
The figure to look at in the evening
The day's access rate is the number of dwellings opened over the number of dwellings scheduled. Tracked stairwell by stairwell and trade by trade, it tells you at once whether the problem is building B, the plumbing package or the time slot you picked.
A rate stuck at 60% on one stairwell on a Tuesday morning is not a fate: it is often a stairwell of people who go to work, where Saturday morning or late afternoon would open twice as many doors. You only know that by measuring, and you only measure it if the field validation comes back the same day.
Give notice by name, keep a key register, leave every door with a document, measure the access rate in the evening: these four moves need no sophisticated tool, they need to be done every day. FloorScan's visit notice generator covers the first, free and with no account. The site tracking module covers all four, starting from the schedule.