A commercial project rarely fails because of the paint it goes wrong in the access, the paperwork, and the operational disruption. To master how to plan a commercial repaint without closing, Perth building owners and facility managers must lock down these critical logistics long before a crew ever arrives.
By Josh Rezaie, Director, ABC Paint & Deco
Ask anyone who has managed a repaint in an occupied building what went wrong and they rarely mention the paint. They mention the tenant who found a crew in the lift lobby at 8am, the quote that left out the stairwell, or the scaffold nobody allowed for.
Putting paint on a wall is the straightforward part of commercial work. Whether the job goes well depends on decisions made weeks earlier, and most of those sit with the person commissioning it. These are the ones to make first.
Map how the building runs before you talk about colour
To understand how to plan a commercial repaint without closing, start with a plain list of what cannot stop. Which entries have to stay open? When do deliveries arrive? Which lifts will tenants and crews share? Who is in the building at 6am, and who is still there at 9pm?
That list decides the staging. Offices usually suit after-hours or weekend work, with each area handed back before the next business morning. Retail work follows trading hours. Strata buildings need residents to keep access to stairwells and balconies, so the job gets broken into stages people can plan around. Healthcare and aged care facilities tend to run room by room or floor by floor, with inductions and access rules on top.
Agree the sequence in writing before anyone starts, and ask how out-of-hours work affects the price. A contractor who cannot give you a start date, a finish date and a sequence for your site has not planned it yet.
Trading environments set the timetable. This shopfront repaint was staged around business hours. Image: ABC Paint & Deco.
Find out what is under the existing paint
Older buildings carry risks a colour schedule will not show, and in WA some of that homework falls to you.
For a workplace in a building constructed before 31 December 2003, WorkSafe WA requires an asbestos register unless no asbestos has been identified there. That duty sits with the person who has management or control of the workplace. Check the register before the scope is written and give a copy to everyone quoting. Sanding, drilling and pressure washing can all disturb asbestos cement, so the painter needs to know where it is before planning any preparation.
Lead is the other concern. Paint applied before about 1970 is the usual worry, although that date is a rule of thumb and not a legal line. On an older building, test the existing coatings before anyone sands them. The Australian guide is AS/NZS 4361.2:2017, which covers commercial and public buildings as well as homes.
Either answer can change the scope and the price. You want to find that out at tender stage, not halfway through the job.
Walk the site to price the access
Access is often the largest single variable in a commercial quote. Two buildings with the same floor area can need very different budgets if one can be reached from the ground and the other needs scaffold, a swing stage or an elevated work platform. Be wary of any high-access price worked out from a plan alone. Get the contractor on site.
Use the walk-through to settle where equipment will stand, where the exclusion zones go and how people will get past them. It is much easier to move a delivery route on paper than on the morning the scaffold arrives.
There is a legal side as well. WA’s work health and safety regulations treat construction work with a potential fall of 2 metres or more as high risk, and a safe work method statement has to be prepared before that work starts. Ask to see it, along with how the crew will meet your site induction rules, before anyone goes up.
High-access structural steel. On work like this, access is planned and priced on site. Image: ABC Paint & Deco.
Keep occupied spaces usable
Low odour and low VOC systems make it far easier to work around people, and they should be the default in occupied offices, healthcare and aged care. Low VOC does not mean no smell, though, and every coating needs time to dry. Build that into the sequence. If a meeting room is painted overnight, find out when it can be used again, and tell the people who booked it.
Preparation is usually the messiest stage, so stage it deliberately and agree how dust, floors and equipment will be protected. Ask who holds the keys and who checks each area at handover. On a well-run job that is one supervisor on site, who is also your single point of contact. It is worth asking for by name.
Back-of-house corridor and fitting rooms in a retail fit-out. Image: ABC Paint & Deco.
Make the quotes comparable
Three quotes with three different scopes tell you very little. Give every contractor the same brief and ask for itemised responses, so a strata committee, board or procurement team can compare them properly.
| Item | What the quote should state |
|---|---|
| Surfaces | Exactly which walls, ceilings, doors, trims and exteriors are in, and what is left out |
| Preparation | Repairs, cleaning, sanding and priming, area by area |
| Coating system | Product, sheen and number of coats for each surface |
| Access | Scaffold, swing stage or platforms, and who supplies them |
| Staging | Working hours, sequence and handover for each area |
| Warranty | Workmanship term in years, separate from the manufacturer’s product warranty, with exclusions |
Pay most attention to the preparation and the number of coats. A lower price usually comes out of those two lines, and you cannot see either of them at handover.
Check the contractor, then match them to the job
A stadium, a strata block and a boutique need different crews, different paperwork and different access equipment, so the best contractor for one may be wrong for another. We published a comparison of nine commercial painters in Perth, ourselves included, and it says plainly which jobs other firms are better placed to win. Whoever you shortlist, these checks take about ten minutes:
- Look up the registration on WA’s Online Licence Search. In Perth, contracts for painting work over $1,000 need a registered painting contractor. A PC number belongs to the contracting business and a PP number to an individual, so your contract should be with the PC holder.
- Match the registered name to the quote. The registered company often differs from the trading name, which is normal, but the contract and invoices should carry the registered entity.
- Ask for certificates of currency for public liability and workers’ compensation, dated before works start.
- Ask for a named project of similar size, and a client contact you can ring.
- Get the workmanship warranty in years, in writing, and ask what it excludes.
When the job is insurance work
Rectification after fire, flood or tenant damage runs on a different clock. The building has to get back into service quickly, and the paperwork has to stand up to a claim. Bring the owner, manager and insurer together early, and ask the contractor to assess the damage on site and scope it in enough detail for an assessor to follow. Everything above still applies, including the asbestos register. Damage is often what exposes the materials nobody has looked at in decades.
Preparing a damaged surface before recoating. Image: ABC Paint & Deco.
One page before the first quote
Before you ask for a price, putting four things on one page is the definitive answer to how to plan a commercial repaint without closing: document what has to keep running, what the asbestos register and coating tests say, how a crew will reach the work, and how you will compare the quotes. Most of the disruption I have described is settled on that single page, long before anyone opens a tin.
About the author: Josh Rezaie is a Director of ABC Paint & Deco, a Dulux Accredited painting contractor (WA licence PC 101034) working on commercial, strata and retail projects across Perth.
