- A finish-out schedule is set by its phases and their conditions, not by square footage alone.
- Permit review and long-lead equipment are the items most likely to control the opening date.
- Lease, drawings and equipment orders can run in parallel when someone plans them that way.
- The only reliable schedule is one built in pre-construction from your drawings, your site and your city.
Why the honest answer starts with a question
Owners ask how long a finish-out takes because a lease has a rent commencement date, a franchisor has an opening window, or a practice has patients to move. But a contractor who gives one before seeing the space, the drawings and the city is guessing, and a guess becomes a promise the moment it is written into a lease.
The truthful answer is that a finish-out moves through a fixed set of phases, and each phase has a few conditions that make it longer or shorter. Knowing them shows where your project will spend its time and what you can do about it. For your own project, the real figure comes from a pre-construction schedule built on your drawings and your site.
The phases, in order
Almost every commercial finish-out passes through the same sequence. Some phases overlap. None can be skipped.
- Lease and design: the lease is negotiated, the space is measured, and the architect and engineers produce permit drawings.
- Permit review: the city building department reviews the plans and issues the permit. Restaurants are also reviewed by the local health authority.
- Long-lead procurement: equipment, HVAC units, electrical gear, storefront, millwork and specialty finishes are ordered, often before the permit is issued.
- Demolition or shell work: existing finishes come out, or the landlord's shell is brought to the point where the tenant's work can begin.
- Rough-in: framing, plumbing, electrical, mechanical and fire protection are installed inside walls and above ceilings.
- Inspections: the city inspects the rough-in before anything is covered.
- Finishes: drywall, paint, flooring, tile, ceilings, millwork and fixtures.
- Equipment and systems: kitchen equipment, dental or medical equipment, low-voltage, signage, furniture.
- Final inspections and certificate of occupancy: the city signs off, the health authority signs off where it applies, and the space may open.
Lease and design: the time before construction
The first phase is the one owners most often leave out of their mental schedule. Construction cannot be priced or permitted without complete drawings, and drawings cannot be finished until the lease defines what the landlord delivers and what the tenant builds.
Three things stretch this phase: a lease that leaves the landlord's work vaguely described, a space with no accurate as-built drawings, and a design that changes after engineering has started.
Three things shorten it: a clear work letter, an early site walk with the contractor, the architect and the landlord's representative, and a decision to run the contractor's constructability review and budgeting alongside design, so pricing problems are found while the drawings are still easy to change.
Permit review: the item you cannot buy back
Once drawings are submitted, the project waits on the city. Review time depends on the city, the completeness of the submission, how many review cycles the comments require, and what else is on the reviewers' desks that month. A restaurant adds the health authority review. Larger commercial projects in Texas also require an accessibility review by a registered accessibility specialist. Check with the city on any other reviews that apply to your use and your building.
The project team cannot make the city faster. It can avoid making the city slower. A complete first submission with coordinated drawings answers most comments before they are written. A quick turnaround on the comments that do arrive keeps the project from losing its place in line.
A contractor experienced in tenant finish-outs in Fort Worth and the surrounding cities knows what each jurisdiction expects in the package and plans the submission accordingly.
Long-lead items and when to order them
Some things in a finish-out cannot be bought off a shelf. Rooftop HVAC units, electrical switchgear and panels, walk-in coolers, kitchen hoods and exhaust systems, storefront glazing, custom millwork, dental chairs and medical equipment, and specialty lighting are made or allocated to order. The lead time is set by the manufacturer, not by the contractor.
If these items are ordered when the permit is issued, the construction phase will stall waiting for them. If they are ordered during design, from approved submittals, they arrive when the building is ready for them. That difference is usually the biggest schedule gain available on a finish-out, and it costs only a decision to release the orders early.
Early release carries a risk: if the design changes after the order, the item may need to be reordered. That is why the long-lead list is built in pre-construction, reviewed with the owner, and released item by item as each part of the design is locked.
Construction: shell work, rough-in, inspections, finishes
Once the permit is in hand and the site is turned over, the work on site begins. In a second-generation space, demolition comes first, and what is found behind the walls and above the ceiling sets the tone for everything after. In a new shell, the landlord's work has to reach a defined point before the tenant's contractor can start.
Rough-in is where most of the trades are on site at once. The pace depends on how well the drawings were coordinated beforehand, whether the existing utilities match the drawings, and whether the subcontractors staff the job on the days scheduled.
The city inspects rough-in before walls are closed. A failed inspection is a lost day and a rescheduled visit. Finishes follow in a fixed order, each trade waiting on the one before: drywall before paint, paint before flooring, flooring before millwork, millwork before equipment. A delay in one trade moves every trade behind it.
What makes construction longer
- Unknown existing conditions found during demolition.
- Design changes issued after rough-in has started.
- Late delivery of long-lead items.
- Owner-furnished items that arrive after the date the schedule assumed.
- Trades stacked on top of each other because an earlier phase slipped.
Equipment, final inspections and the certificate of occupancy
The last phase is short on the plan and long in practice. Kitchen equipment has to be set, connected and tested. Dental and medical equipment often needs the manufacturer's own technician for installation. Low-voltage, point-of-sale, security and signage usually involve vendors the owner hired directly, and they need to be scheduled into the contractor's calendar, not around it.
Then the city returns for final inspections: building, mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire, and the health authority for a restaurant. Each must pass before the certificate of occupancy is issued and the space can open. The contractor's job in this phase is to have every system ready on inspection day and every correction closed the same week, so the certificate is not held up by a single open item.
How a real schedule is produced in pre-construction
A reliable schedule is not a rule of thumb. It is built in pre-construction from specific inputs: the lease work letter, the drawings as they stand, a site walk, the city's review process, the long-lead list with the manufacturers' current lead times, and the subcontractors' commitments for the trades involved. The result is a project development schedule showing every phase, every dependency and every date the owner must meet.
The schedule is then reviewed with the owner before anything is committed. If the opening date does not work, the conversation happens at the beginning, when there is still room to simplify the design, release equipment earlier or adjust the lease dates, rather than at the end, when the only option left is to pay for overtime.
If you want a date for your own finish-out, share the lease, the drawings and the address, and ask for a schedule built on them. Talk to Harrison Construction about a pre-construction review.
Questions owners ask
Can you give me a rough number if I tell you the square footage?
Not an honest one. Two spaces of the same size can have very different schedules depending on the city, the condition of the existing space, the equipment involved and the state of the drawings. We will give you a real schedule once we have seen those things, which usually takes a short site walk and a review of the lease and drawings.
What is the single item most likely to delay my opening?
For most finish-outs, it is one of two things: permit review or long-lead equipment. Both are set in motion early, and both are hard to recover later. The best protection is a complete permit submission and a long-lead list that is released during design.
Can construction start before the permit is issued?
Work that needs a permit cannot start until the permit is issued. Procurement, submittals, subcontractor buyout and scheduling can and should proceed while the city reviews the plans, so the site is ready to go the day the permit is in hand. Check with the city on whether any early demolition or pre-work is allowed in your case.
Does a restaurant take longer than an office of the same size?
Usually, yes. A restaurant adds a health authority review, a commercial kitchen with hood, exhaust and grease interceptor work, more plumbing and electrical capacity, and more long-lead equipment. Each of these adds steps to the schedule. The restaurant construction page covers what those steps involve.
How does the contractor keep the schedule from slipping once construction starts?
By looking ahead. Each week the schedule is updated against what was actually done, the coming work is confirmed with every subcontractor and vendor, inspections are booked early, and anything at risk is raised with the owner while there is still time to act.
