Office refurbishment, in the right order

Most refurbishments decide the furniture last.

The skip is usually booked before anyone asks the question

A typical commercial office refurbishment runs in a fixed order. A lease event or a growth plan creates the trigger. A layout is drawn. A furniture schedule is written from the layout. Suppliers are invited to price the schedule.

By the fourth step every decision that matters has already been made, and the existing furniture has usually been booked into a skip to clear the floor for works.

Which is how a refurbishment ends up costing more than it needed to. You cannot schedule what has not been surveyed, so reuse becomes impossible for reasons of sequencing rather than suitability — and the client is told it was not viable when nobody actually checked.

We work the other way round. The audit comes before the design, so the decision about what to keep is made on evidence rather than by default. Sometimes the honest answer is that you should buy less than you were planning to.

Refurbishment is one part of what we do. There is more on the wider picture on our office design page.

What an office refurbishment involves

We can take a refurbishment from the first survey through to the day people move back in, or pick it up at any point in between.

Furniture audit and reuse feasibility, before the design is fixed
Space planning and layout, sized on how the building is actually used
Specification, with continuity of parts agreed with the supply chain
Reupholstery, repair and remanufacture of retained items
Phased installation in buildings that stay in use
Clearance, rehoming and recycling, with waste transfer notes
Storage between phases, tracked and accounted for
Carbon and cost reporting you can put in a return

Refurbishing a building that is still in use

Most refurbishments do not get an empty building. They get a floor at a time, a corridor, a two-hour window, and a fire route that has to stay clear throughout.

That is a logistics problem more than a furniture one. Sequencing, storage, out-of-hours access, and knowing which parts of a schedule can wait and which cannot. It is also the part that decides whether a programme holds or slips.

We use our own installation teams, vehicles and warehousing, which means a programme can absorb a change of date without a chain of subcontractors having to agree to it first.

At Chase Farm Hospital we refurbished administrative, meeting and patient areas with the building in full use, phased across the quietest occupancy windows, with removal and recycling handled in the same visits. No area closed and nothing went to landfill.

The audit that happens before the design

An hour with a clipboard, before anything is specified. Condition by item, quantities, what can be reupholstered, what can be redeployed, what has genuinely reached the end of its life, and what needs to be new.

The output is a document you can design from — which is what turns reuse from a line in a sustainability statement into a line on a drawing.

At BRE Science Park that meant 240 items retained, 7.44 tonnes of CO2e avoided and £29,930 not spent. On a larger project it meant 3,507 items sourced without buying anything new and £450,902 saved against the cost of new.

Those are cost figures with a carbon benefit attached, not the other way round. Every item is documented, so the numbers survive an auditor rather than just reading well.

Existing office furniture audited and sorted for reuse during refurbishment

Working to a programme, not a delivery date

Long-lead items are the most common cause of a refurbishment slipping, and they are almost always discovered late — once the schedule is issued, when there is no time left to change them and no contingency left to absorb the difference.

We check availability and lead times at specification stage rather than at order stage, and agree in writing who may approve a substitution. It costs nothing and it prevents most of what goes wrong.

Everything we supply carries a ten-year supported warranty, with maintenance beyond it and take-back at end of life. We have been in St Albans since 1974, so a ten-year warranty is a promise we are demonstrably still around to keep.

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Where the old furniture actually goes

When furniture reaches the end of its service with you, it rarely reaches the end of its useful life. We rehome, remanufacture or recycle — for the British Library that meant redundant furniture going to local community organisations rather than into a skip, and for the Lord Lieutenant’s Charity Hub in Hertfordshire it meant £31,000 of quality pre-loved furniture furnishing a charity space at no cost, avoiding 4.3 tonnes of CO2e.

Zero to landfill is a claim your own reporting inherits, so it needs a paper trail: where each item went, who took it, and a waste transfer note to prove it. If we cannot evidence it, you cannot report it.