Office Strip-Out: What Leaves, and What You Must Record

A strip-out is priced by what leaves the building and how it leaves, not by the floor area it leaves from. Three things move the number — access, hours, and what is above the ceiling — and two of them are fixed by the building before anyone quotes. Meanwhile the waste is legally yours: section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 makes you responsible for where it goes, and the records outlive the job by two years.

Everyone treats the strip-out as the simple part. It is the phase with no design, no client decisions and nothing to choose, so it gets a round number early and nobody looks at it again until it is the thing holding up the programme.

That is backwards. A fit-out is largely under your control — you pick the spec, you pick the pace. A strip-out is mostly under the building's control, and the building was not designed with you leaving in mind. What an office fit-out costs covers the money going in. This is the money going out, and it behaves differently.

What a strip-out actually is

The controlled removal of a tenant's fit-out: partitions, ceilings, floor boxes, data cabling, kitchens, joinery, branding, and often the mechanical and electrical services installed to serve them.

It is not demolition. The structure stays, the landlord's services usually stay, and the building carries on around you. What you are buying is not destruction but separation — taking one layer out of a building without damaging the layers either side of it.

The distinction that costs people money

A strip-out removes what is there. Reinstatement puts back a defined condition — usually Category A, and usually specified in the Licence to Alter you signed before the fit-out rather than in the lease. You can complete a perfect strip-out and still not have reinstated, because the licence asks for a ceiling grid, a floor finish and working services that the strip-out has just taken out. Read what the licence gives you and what it does not before you price the works.

The three things that decide the price

One: access

The single largest variable, and it is decided entirely by the building.

A ground-floor unit with its own shutter and somewhere legal to stand a skip is a different job from a sixth floor served by one goods lift shared with tenants who are still trading — at identical floor area, identical scope. Everything that comes out has to travel the same route, in a lift with a booking sheet, in loads sized by what fits rather than what is efficient.

Ask the building three questions before you ask anyone for a price: what is the goods lift capacity, when may it be booked, and where can a vehicle legally wait.

The same three answers govern anything mechanical going the other way. If plant is being replaced rather than removed, the 12 kW inspection duty most offices already cross covers the report you are probably entitled to and almost certainly have not read.

Two: hours

Most London buildings will not let strip-out noise happen during trading hours. That pushes the work into evenings, weekends or nights, and out-of-hours work is not the same work at a premium — it is a different job. Shorter productive windows, a security presence, and a team who cannot simply carry on when they hit something unexpected because the building empties at a fixed time.

A programme built on daytime working and then delivered out of hours is not a programme that ran late. It was wrong when it was written.

Three: what is above the ceiling

The honest answer before anyone opens it is that nobody knows. Above a suspended ceiling in a London office there may be your services, the previous tenant's abandoned services, the landlord's live services, and a structure nobody has photographed since it was built.

This is the part where a fixed lump sum quoted off a floor plan becomes a negotiation later. The better route is a survey that opens a sample of ceiling before pricing, and a scope that says explicitly what is assumed and what is excluded — the same discipline as two quotes, same job — what is inside the price.

The waste is legally yours

This is the part that surprises tenants, and it is the reason a cheap strip-out price is worth reading twice.

Approved Documents are statutory guidance to the Building Regulations 2010 for England. Compliance is judged against the Requirements in Schedule 1; the Approved Document shows one way of meeting them. Your building control body has the final word on your specific building.

Read the second row again, because it is the one nobody expects. Parliament exempted the householder and did not exempt the business. When you strip out an office you are a waste producer with a statutory duty, and that duty does not transfer to your contractor merely because you paid them.

What it means in practice is small and cheap: get the carrier's registration number and check it, get the destination site's permit, and keep the written descriptions. A contractor who cannot produce those on request is not saving you money — they are holding your liability.

The order that saves the most money

1. 01Get the reinstatement obligation in writing first. From the Licence to Alter, not the lease, and not from memory. It defines the finish line. Pricing a strip-out before you know what has to go back is pricing half a job.
2. 02Commission a refurbishment and demolition asbestos survey. Not the building's existing management survey — that one is about leaving asbestos undisturbed, which is the opposite of what a strip-out does. Regulation 5 is about what you know before you start, and finding out afterwards stops the job.
3. 03Open a sample of ceiling before anyone prices it. One tile in three locations. It is the cheapest hour on the project and it converts the biggest unknown into a scope line rather than a variation.
4. 04Establish access and hours from the building manager, in writing. Goods lift capacity and booking rules, permitted working hours, where a vehicle may legally wait, and whether a security presence is required out of hours. These decide the programme before any contractor sees the space.
5. 05Ask what is being kept. Sometimes the incoming tenant wants your partitions, your kitchen or your ceiling. Every item retained is one that does not need removing, transporting or disposing of — three costs at once, and the only one that also reduces the waste record.
6. 06Check the carrier and the destination, and keep the paperwork. Registration number, permit, and the written description of the waste. Two years for non-hazardous, three for hazardous consignment notes. The duty is yours whoever carries it away.

When doing it yourself beats paying the landlord's figure

A schedule of dilapidations is a claim, not a bill — priced on the landlord's assumptions, by the landlord's surveyor, for work the landlord will procure.

Which means the comparison worth running before you concede a number is the one almost nobody runs: what would it cost to do this work yourself, on your own programme, with your own contractor, before you hand the keys back? Frequently less. Occasionally much less. You have time, choice of contractor and access while the lease is still running — three advantages you lose the moment it ends and the work becomes somebody else's line item on a claim against you.

That is not a reason to strip out. It is a reason to price it properly before deciding.

Why a builder is writing this

Because we do this work in buildings that stay open while we do it — retail on Sloane Street, and Cat A and Cat B works inside the V&A's Europe 1600–1815 galleries, where the public were on the other side of the hoarding.

In every one of those jobs the strip-out was the phase that decided whether the rest ran. Not because it was difficult, but because it was the phase where the building told us what was actually there — and the only projects where that went badly were the ones that had priced it from a drawing.

2VP is the builder, not a marketplace: one contract, one named project lead, and no introducer fee stacked on the cost. The waste records come as part of the job, because they are your legal documents and not our filing.

The one line to take away

Ask what leaves, how it leaves, and who holds the paper afterwards. The answer to the third one is you — and that is true whichever contractor you appoint.