We're the supplier, which means we get the phone call when a renovation is already in trouble. After enough of those calls you start seeing the same seven mistakes on repeat. Here they are, with what each one costs and the boring paperwork that prevents it.
1. Starting demolition before materials are secured
The classic. The crew is available, the owner is impatient, floor four gets stripped - and then everyone discovers the carpet is six weeks out. Those rooms now earn nothing while the property pays for everything.
Run it the other way. Confirm every material with a written delivery date, get the bulk of it on site, then strip the first floor. A renovation calendar should be built backwards from delivery dates, not forwards from enthusiasm.
2. Accepting verbal lead times
"Two, maybe three weeks" is not a lead time. It's a mood. And when it becomes six weeks, you have nothing to point at and nowhere to send the invoice for your empty floor.
Every purchase order should carry a date and a consequence. Ours say it plainly: on time, or we credit the project. Ask any supplier you're considering to put their version in writing. The reaction tells you most of what you need to know.
3. Ordering floor by floor instead of reserving the batch
Wallcoverings and carpets are made in dye batches, and batches drift. Order floor three this month and floor five in October, and the corridors won't quite match - subtle in person, obvious in the booking photos, maddening forever.
Reserve the whole project's quantity from one batch before installation starts, plus attic stock for repairs. We hold reserved batches for phased projects; it's a one-line request that saves a permanent problem.
4. Putting residential materials in commercial corridors
The price difference between residential and commercial grade is real, and so is the difference in what happens next. Residential vinyl on a corridor wall meets luggage trolleys and industrial cleaners, and within a year it's scuffed through. Then you pay for materials and installation a second time - now with rooms out of service again.
Type II wallcoverings and proper contract flooring exist for this exact duty. The specs are in our fit-out guide.
5. Treating fire documentation as someone else's problem
Nobody enjoys the data sheet conversation, so it gets skipped - until an inspection, an insurance claim, or worst of all an actual fire. A commercial property needs Class A (ASTM E84) or EN 13501-1 documentation for the wallcoverings going in, filed and findable.
The fix costs nothing: demand the data sheet at sample stage, not after installation. If a supplier can't produce one, that's not a product, that's a liability with a pattern on it. We turn data sheets around within a working hour. Our fire rating guide decodes the standards.
6. Letting the spec drift between approval and delivery
You approved a specific product. What arrives is... similar. Same colour family, thinner gauge, different brand, "equivalent." Sometimes it's a contractor saving margin; sometimes a vendor substituting what's in stock. Either way the property absorbs the downgrade, usually without ever knowing.
The defence is a signed document tying the delivered batch to the approved sample - code, colourway, batch number. That's our Spec Lock Certificate, and the long version of this fight is in the spec substitution guide.
7. Renovating everything except the sound
New surfaces, new lighting, and the restaurant is still so loud guests can't talk. Acoustics are the renovation line item that gets cut first because it's invisible on the mood board - and it's the one guests physically feel every visit. Treating 15-25% of wall area in public spaces, with materials that read as decor, fixes it for a small slice of the budget. Ideas and numbers in the acoustic decoration guide.
The pattern behind all seven
None of these are design failures. They're supply-chain and paperwork failures, which is good news - paperwork is cheap. A written delivery date, a reserved batch, a data sheet, a signed spec confirmation. Four documents, and the renovation that was going to be a story becomes just a renovation.
That's the way we've set up our terms, and it's why the properties in our project list opened when they said they would. The full planning playbook - budgets, phasing, materials by area - is in the hotel renovation guide.
