Drop Ceiling

Tonkadad

Not sure if this is the right place but here goes. We are bidding on a commercial remodel of an entire 9th floor approx. 14,000 sq. ft. They want to remove all of the exisitng partion walls (it was one large office space used by 1 tenant) and build new partion walls to create 4 seperate offices. Apparently the 1 big office is hard to rent.

The main reason for changing the ceiling is that it is larger than a 2' x 4' grid and property managment wants to standardize it with the rest of the building.

I would like to get some feed back on how we plan to do it:

We were going to blow out all of the exisitng partion walls and even the electrical (because it now needs to be housed in a common area) and then with a plumb laser transfer the location of the sprinkler heads and anything else in the way to the floor and figure out on the floor how to best place the grid.

The building is 86' wide by 166' long and in the center is the elevators fire escapes and bathrooms.

We obviously have the option of treating it like 4 seperate areas (since we know where the new partion walls are going) and starting fresh so to speak at each new wall partition.

The project will be permitted, and we will be the general, this is our first large (for us) scale project. we will have subs for electrical and plumbing and might even sub out the ceiling if need be.

thanks,

Bob Kovacs

If you're permitting the job, someone should be creating a drawing. Once you've got the drawing showing partition layouts, you can lay out the ceiling grid to best fit the room. The typical solution is the center the grid layout in the room is a way that doesn't leave any really small cuts at the edges (nothing less than 6", though more than a 1/2 tile is better).

As far as working around the sprinkler heads, it'd be far easier to just have them relocated as needed, rather than trying to work the layout around them. Re-partitioning the area is likely going to require relocations anyway, as the coverage and layout of the heads will be affected. Anything else (light fixtures, HVAC diffusers/registers, etc), can just be shifted into the new grid layout.

Bob

Tonkadad

Yes, we have a drawing of where the partition walls go. As with anything money is an issue for the client, so we want to try to avoid as much as possible sprinkler relocation, and if that can be acomplished by mapping out existing locations then that makes sense to me.

But I do hear what you are saying, so I will keep in mind both goals, reasonable size perimeter pcs. and sprkler head location.

Thanks for the input Bob.

Tom M

You have to relocate your sprinklers to accomadate new hallways and such I cant see how all this work can be dictated by any existing location. If your architect has original diagrams for the floor then maybe he can work some magic but I cant see failing inspections and then pulling apart all this work to redo it later.

Tonkadad

Obviously the sprklr head location has to be to code, thats a given, what we are trying to do is to see if we can adjust the grid to miss existing head locations if at all possible.