Can you work out of hours on a commercial building?

When working outside normal hours genuinely earns its cost

There are buildings where it is obviously right. A restaurant or a bar where the roof work sits over the dining room. A retail unit on a pedestrianised street where the delivery window is fixed by the council. A laboratory or a clean process area where dust during operations is unacceptable. A school where the answer is simply to do it in the holidays. A dealership or showroom where the sales floor is the business.

There are also buildings where it is not worth paying for. A warehouse with 9 metres of clear height and racking that can be moved one aisle at a time rarely needs us out of hours, because the work happens far above anybody’s head and a cordon handles the rest. Before you buy out-of-hours working, it is worth asking whether normal-hours working with good containment would actually cost you anything.

Daylight is the real constraint

Roof work is daylight work. From late October to late February a Saturday in Oxford gives roughly eight usable hours, and the last of those are poor. A summer evening gives you a genuine extra three or four hours after five o’clock. That asymmetry decides what an out-of-hours programme looks like far more than our diary does.

Task lighting has its place for finishing an internal reveal or making an opening secure, and we carry it. It is not a substitute for daylight when the work is judging whether a membrane is dressed correctly up a kerb or whether a flashing lap will hold in wind. If a job is proposed for winter evenings, we will tell you the honest number of productive hours in it, which is usually smaller than the client expects.

What we will not agree to

We do not open a roof at a time of day when it cannot be closed before darkness. We do not work at height in wind speeds above the limit for the access equipment in use, regardless of what the programme says. We do not carry out lifting operations over an occupied area, at any hour. And we do not take on a night shift pattern, because a tired crew on a roof is a bad idea and because the work does not get better in the dark.

Saying no to some of these things is part of the service. If a proposed programme cannot be delivered safely or to standard, we would rather lose the job at tender than deliver it badly and be back in a year.

Weekends usually beat evenings

An evening visit costs you a mobilisation, a set-up and a demobilisation for perhaps three usable hours in summer and almost nothing in winter. A Saturday gives a full day for one set-up. Where a building has to keep trading Monday to Friday, a run of Saturdays is almost always cheaper and quicker than a run of evenings for the same amount of work.

Better still, where the occupier can accommodate it, is a single continuous closure: a week between Christmas and New Year, a school holiday, a factory shutdown, a stocktake. That gives us a normal programme at close to normal cost with the building empty, and it is the arrangement we push clients towards whenever it is possible.

Why the roof still gets closed before we leave

Whatever the hours, the rule does not change: the roof is never left open overnight. An opening that has been formed is either finished, or made properly weathertight with a temporary covering that is mechanically fixed and dressed to shed water, not a sheet held down with blocks.

Out-of-hours working actually makes this stricter rather than looser, because there is nobody in the building to notice if something moves at three in the morning. We size the day’s work so that closing time is a planned event with an hour in hand for weather, not something we get to when we get to it. That is why we will not accept a programme that requires an opening to be cut at seven in the evening.

Noise, dust and the people two floors down

Out-of-hours does not mean unlimited noise. Many commercial buildings in Oxford have flats above, beside or below them, and many sit inside areas where the council imposes hours on construction noise. Cutting a metal deck or breaking out an old kerb is loud, and doing it at seven on a Sunday morning will produce a complaint even if the building itself is empty.

So the sequence gets planned around noise as well as around trading: noisy operations in the middle of a Saturday, quiet finishing work at the margins. Where a building is in a mixed-use street, we ask you to check the council’s permitted hours for noisy works before the programme is fixed, because that constraint sits with the building rather than with us.

Permission from whoever controls the building

Out-of-hours access on a commercial site needs more arrangement than a weekday. Someone has to unlock and lock. The intruder alarm has to be isolated for the roof zone and reset afterwards. Security or a keyholder has to be available. On a managed estate there will be a permit to work, and on a shared building the other tenants have to be told.

None of that is difficult, but all of it takes lead time, and it is the most common reason an out-of-hours start slips. We ask for the name of the person who can actually authorise access, and their out-of-hours number, before the date is confirmed rather than on the morning. Our page on replacing rooflights on an occupied building covers how the working day is arranged when the occupier stays put.

Getting it into the quotation properly

Tell us the hours you need at enquiry stage, not after the price arrives. Out-of-hours working is priced into the number rather than added to it, and a quotation built on weekday working cannot simply be moved to weekends without changing. What we need to know is which days and hours are available, whether there is a closure period we could use instead, who holds the keys, and whether there is any noise restriction on the building.

You will still get two figures: a range by email, then a fixed price after the survey. The premium for weekend or shutdown working shows as its own line so you can see what the convenience is costing and decide whether it is worth it. Call 01865 704245 or email info@heritageskylightsoxford.co.uk. We install and replace rooflights only, and the workmanship carries a ten-year guarantee.