CPM schedulers depend on their resources and colleagues to help them plot the timeline of a luxury residential high-rise out of the ground mostly because they generally lack the on-hands experience to recreate the sequence of installations in a CPM timeline all by themselves. Even when the scheduler does have the requisite experience, he will be reliant on project specific input regarding resources, logistics, and constraints. In luxury residential building, these challenges become protracted.

Core and Shell: getting to weathertight

Luxury residential high-rise Interior fit-out is contingent on the development of the core and shell. As the floors come up, the curtain wall follows behind at a safe distance from the working platform, as prescribed by OSHA and other safety officials. Core and shell often experience delays, such as SOE or excavation issues, and weather delays. Typically, fit-out inherits these delays, starting off its odyssey on a bad foot.

Within the interior, MEP risers and standpipe come up with the deck. Twenty-eight days later, layout is struck and light-gauge partitions can be framed. Some of the MEP branch work may follow the framing. If the curtain wall doesn’t keep pace with the concrete pours, interior work will be stymied. In some cases, interior fit-out takes place with neither curtain wall, nor a roof in place – a ‘wet’ building. If you look up and see that, you will know something is wrong.

The only fit-out scopes of work that may be achieved before the building is weather tight are those that are unaffected by damp and moisture – like those mentioned above. Electric motors, cabling, insulation, and gypsum board and plastering, may not be installed until such time as a building is weatheright. Temporary heat may be needed to spackle in an unheated building.

Luxury residential units will have their own heating and cooling controls and equipment, be it a fan coil, radiator, dehumidifier, or other method of acclimatizing each unit. These are fed by branchwork from MEP risers, which also must be in a heated space to avoid freeze ups, and absorption from the common areas into the units.

Once both the building back of house and units are acclimatized for heat and humidity, finishes, such as doors, trims, casework, and wood flooring may be delivered. Any early delivery – before acclimatization – may subject product to moisture damage that could also void warranties. Storing material on a site without climate control is asking for trouble. Installing it almost guarantees it.

Site Logistics: leave it to the engineers – if you dare.

Hopefully, the engineers have arranged cranes and hoist in such a way as to facilitate, not inhibit or impede fit-out production. Downtime must be afforded in the schedule for each hoist and crane jump. Any rigging involving a leave out of the curtain wall will mean interior ‘come-back’ work for that location. On a good day, that is a bedroom, or living room – or other program that has little or no MEP, as opposed to a bath or kitchen, that will have extensive roughs and finishes.

Fit-out interior logistics in luxury residential can be thought of as scaled Swiss watches – with hundreds of moving parts, each dependent on the motion of one or more parts. When a single part fails, part or all of the watch ceases to operate. There are two causes of this phenomenon: inherited delays from core and shell have reduced fit-out window, and low-percentage KPI out of sequence and other delays in the fit-out work itself.

Since the finishes are some of the last installations to be completed before punchlist, there is invariably a literal mad scramble to reach that milestone. A typical luxury residential  ‘close-out’ will have all the trades throughout the building at once, bouncing around, working wherever they can access – trade congestion. At this point, the production/installation schedules are utterly useless as  dynamic project control tools. Added pressure of acceleration and reduced duration makes for a perfect close-out storm of increased mistakes, and decreased quality..

Fit-out Free For-all?

Luxury residential starts with Level 5 walls, and high-end, bespoke finish and material programs. For high-rise, each type of unit belongs to a group, all of which are built in exactly the same way, i.e., uncustomized. Thus, you may have groups of single, 2 and 3 bedrooms, studios, and duplexes to facilitate ease of design, filing and permitting, fabricating, and installation.

‘The skill sets are out there, but almost all are spoken for as cherished long-term enterprise personnel that seldom abandon their posts.

In some cases – retrofit or repurposed buildings, buyers are allowed to customize their own units. Such customizations increase cost and schedule duration an average of 25% more than standardized installations do. In some cases, drawn out customizations delay TCO, inspiring the wrath of fellow shareholders, or owners. For that reason, developers tend to avoid them.

It behooves a contractor to frame, rough-out, fabricate and deliver, and install the units according to their grouping. This grouping facilitates the fabricators and installers especially well. That’s because they want to set up their production line only once for each group, and may upcharge for an extra run. It wouldn’t help the installation crew either – to work on five different layouts when they could master each group, one at a time.

‘You can burn up all the money in the world in luxury building, and still end up with a basketcase. The contract sum often as no more correlation to the end product than the contractor’s original promises.

Once fabrication and installation sequences change and the groupings begin to disintegrate, the project is officially out-of sequence. Material haphazardly, and pell-mell, arrives on site – always at the busiest or most inconvenient times. Subcontractors run amok, looking for any floor they can work unmolested. Instead of consecutive floors, trades inhabit nooks and crannies all over the site, causing logistic chaos in the workplace. .

At this point, the interior (non-milestone) project schedule logic is vastly different than the baseline, which should have been re-baselined to reflect that. In most cases, it’s not really possible to predict where various resources end up working each week, or even each day. What’s more, the linearity of each operation begins to deprecate as crews keep finding themselves constantly doing comeback work. They may achieve 95% of completion of an area, only to have to wait 6 months to return to complete the remaining 5%. Such constant ‘mob/demob,’ is the bane of the subcontractor’s existence.

Dressed in Borrowed Robes?

‘There is no fakery in luxury residential building quality – only the charlatanism of builders who professes to deliver something they simply cannot, no matter how hard they try.

But often larger problems, such as quality control, often obfuscate schedule delays. If fit-out duration was reduced or accelerated 20%, for example, expect a 20% drop-off in quality of material and installation. Since we’re talking about luxury residential, a contractor must understand the criteria, and have worked up to the highest level before he should contract to build any such. There is no jumping the shark in luxury residential project delivery – a contractor has to earn it.

The nature of luxury residential fit-out is that lay-people can’t judge the quality of the fit-out until the finishes are ready to be installed, or after all the MEP roughing. Experienced schedulers know that high-end roughing takes longer to do than commercial work, say. What it takes to get the rough-in to the level it needs to be for the finishes is a struggle of the highest magnitude when using mechanics who have never worked within strict tolerances.

Before a contractor can claim to be a luxury outfit, he first needs to have the resources to pay quality personnel at a level commensurate with their skill level, just as you can’t send a ‘B’ team to do ‘A’ work. One obstacle to delivering luxury is the scarcity of skilled craftspeople, and talented project controls and project managers needed to do this work. Yet, if bootstrap EPCs and contractors understood the value of skilled and talented personnel, they wouldn’t be so parsimonious with their salary offers.‘

‘Quality or luxury residential level subcontractors are leery of loser CMS and GCs, and will pad their bids, if they agree to bid at all.

Yet, too often the blame can be traced back to the owner or stakeholders, who over-negotiate their position, value-engineering only that work the contractor makes a profit on. It’s no wonder drawings and sketches are published half-cocked, and that designers are nowhere to be found by the time they’re needed on site. But then no one is forced to bend-over. There’s always someone they can pass it down the line to – the hapless subcontractor who doesn’t pad his bid.