A London fit-out contractor brought us in on an occupied commercial building in central London to put right damage to doors, frames and metalwork before handover. The job ran across ten days on site, working alongside the other trades rather than after them.
What the damage actually was
Fit-out damage is rarely one big defect. It is the accumulation of a programme: trolleys through door leaves, ladders against frames, fixings in the wrong place, protection that came off too early. On this job the list came out as:
- Two veneered swing doors with significant impact damage to the leaf
- Veneer that had lifted and detached along most of the outer edge of a door, which had to be re-glued before any finishing could start
- Screw holes in frames and door faces that needed filling, sanding and re-finishing
- Kitchen unit doors that needed cleaning and re-spraying rather than replacing
- Powder-coated metal doors on one floor that had scuffed and needed polishing back
- Window frames with holes and surface damage across several elevations
None of it was structural. All of it was the sort of thing a client walks past on a handover inspection and puts on a list.
Re-gluing before re-finishing
The detached veneer mattered more than it looked. A lifted veneer edge cannot be filled and sprayed over, because the movement underneath will open the repair up again within weeks. It had to be glued back down, clamped and left before any filling started. That sequencing is the difference between a repair that holds and a repair that comes back as a snag.
Colour matching on site
The doors and frames were existing finishes with no spec sheet available on site. Rather than guess, our technician took samples from the frames and the doors, matched to those, and brought the materials back in. Repairs on joinery are judged against the surface next to them, in the light that room actually has, so matching happens on site and not from a code.
More on how that works is on our page about commercial joinery finishing, and the spray side of it on commercial spray painting.
Working inside someone else’s programme
Two things about this job are worth saying plainly, because they are what a main contractor is really buying.
The first is induction. Our technician could not start until the site induction was done, which cost most of a first morning. We plan for that; a repair team that turns up expecting to walk straight on is a team that burns a day of your programme.
The second is access. On one visit the ladder our technician had been using was taken by another trade, which stopped frame work until it was sorted. On a live fit-out, access equipment has to be ours and booked, not borrowed. Where work is above head height we bring our own and work to the relevant method statement.
Why a fit-out contractor calls a repair team at all
Because replacing a veneered door is not just the cost of the door. It is the lead time on a matched leaf, the ironmongery coming off and going back on, the hanging, and the hole in the programme while you wait. Repairing the leaf in place takes that out of the equation entirely.
The same argument applies to frames, metalwork and kitchen units, which is the whole basis of what we do for contractors. We have set that out in full on construction surface repairs.
What we did not do
We did not replace anything on this job, and we did not touch anything structural. Where a door leaf is split through or delaminated across the face, repair is the wrong answer and we say so. Being straight about that is why contractors call us back.
If you have a handover list like this
Send through photographs of the damage and we will tell you what is repairable and what is not before anyone comes to site. We work across London, Essex and Kent and on commercial sites more widely. See also commercial office repairs and who we work with.
Client name withheld. Details in this case study are taken from our own site reports; the building and the contractor are not identified.
