Office renovation in Batumi for your workstations and equipment

We start by counting people and workstations

We plan an office around the people, not the walls: how many will work in the space and how. An open-plan room with twenty desks, five offices for two people each and an office that receives clients give three different layouts and three different wiring plans, even when the floor area is the same.

Before the site measurement we ask for a short list: the number of workstations now and in a year's time, and whether you need a meeting room, a manager's office, a staff kitchen, space for a server cabinet or at least for a router and a switch. If you have your own IT specialist, we add their network requirements to the brief. The architect draws the layout from this list, and we work out a detailed estimate from the layout.

The premises may be in a business centre, on the ground floor of a residential building or in a new build with no finishes, and each option has its own rules for the work, covered below. Fire safety requirements, floor slab loads and approvals from the owner for any commercial premises are explained in our section on renovating commercial premises.

Partitions and quiet meeting rooms

One complaint about a finished office is expensive to fix later: every word can be heard outside the meeting room. Sound escapes not so much through the partition as over it, when the partition stops at the suspended ceiling. So we take the walls of offices and meeting rooms up to the concrete slab and fill the stud frame with mineral wool.

The other leaks are small, but there are many of them: a gap under the door, one ventilation grille shared by two offices, a joint between a glass partition and the ceiling with no seal. We fit meeting room doors with seals all round and run the ducts to neighbouring offices as separate branches.

A glass partition is made to measure once the floor and ceiling are finished, so we put its lead time into the schedule from the very start. If the layout isn't settled yet, it is easy to test it in a design project: moving a wall on a drawing costs less than moving it on site.

Wiring and a network point for every workstation

We split the office wiring into circuits: workstations, air conditioning, the kitchen, lighting and the server cabinet. If everything hangs on a couple of lines, the kettle and a heater in January will trip the breaker along with half the computers. Every circuit is labelled in the distribution board. The line for the server and network equipment is run separately, so that it can be connected through a UPS (uninterruptible power supply).

We run a network cable to every desk, even if everyone works on Wi-Fi for now. Laying cable while the walls are open costs little, while chasing finished walls a year later costs more and makes more mess. Wi-Fi access points go on the ceiling according to a coverage plan, not wherever the cable was easiest to bring.

Desks in an open-plan room get moved more often than it seems at the layout stage. For that we leave perimeter trunking or floor boxes and a couple of spare breakers in the board. We photograph the cable routes before they are closed up, the diagram goes into the handover file, and the next electrician won't have to hunt for a line with a hammer drill.

Air conditioning, fresh air and the ceiling

An office for twenty people with computers heats up more than an apartment of the same size. We size the air conditioning for the people, equipment and windows, and run the refrigerant and condensate lines at the rough stage, before the ceiling goes up. Cassette and ducted units need a suspended ceiling and an access hatch for cleaning the filters, so we choose the type of unit together with the ceiling.

An air conditioner cools the air but doesn't replace it. A meeting room without a window gets stuffy an hour into a meeting, so we put supply and extract ventilation into closed rooms, or at the very least a fresh air inlet valve in the outside wall. Outdoor units go where the building's rules allow: business centres usually have set places for them on the facade or the roof.

A suspended cassette ceiling is practical because any tile can be lifted out to reach a cable, a drain or an air conditioning unit. In reception and the manager's office plasterboard looks neater, but we plan access panels into it from the start. We rarely fit a stretch ceiling in an office, because there is no access to the services above it. Where it still makes sense is clear from our comparison of stretch ceilings and plasterboard.

Floors and walls for daily wear

Chair castors wear tracks wherever a chair rolls all day. For an office we use class 33 laminate and put protective mats under the chairs, or choose SPC vinyl. In reception and the staff kitchen porcelain tiles make sense: on rainy days people bring water and sand in at the entrance, and coffee gets spilt in the kitchen. We lay the joint between porcelain and laminate flush, with no threshold, so that a trolley with water bottles can roll over it.

We paint office walls with washable paint. It is easy to touch up where chairs knock the wall, and the colour will match if you keep the tint code. Why paint is usually more practical in commercial premises is covered in our comparison of paint and wallpaper.

An office in a business centre, a residential building or a new build

In a business centre the management company sets the rules for renovation. It usually wants to see the layout and diagrams before work starts, allocates hours for the goods lift and for noisy work, and asks for the shared corridor to be protected. We build these conditions into the schedule. If noise is only allowed in the evenings and at weekends, you see it straight away in the timeline and the estimate.

In a residential building the neighbours live on the other side of the wall, and noisy work is done during the day: by law from 08:00 to 23:00, or under the building's rules if they are stricter. We check the building's rules on visitors and signage with the management company before drawing the layout.

In a new build an office often comes as a bare shell with service connections and no partitions. This is convenient: we build the walls to your layout straight away. We keep the staff kitchen and toilet close to the drain connections, otherwise the floor would have to be raised to give the pipe its fall. If the allocated power isn't enough, we start the application to increase it in parallel with the layout, because the network company works to its own timeline.

When an office is simply refreshed between tenants, with no changes to the services, cosmetic renovation is enough: painting, new flooring in the walkways, new ceiling tiles and light fittings.

How much an office renovation costs in Batumi

An office renovation with materials costs from 660 to 960 ₾ per m². This price includes partitions, the services at both the rough and finishing stages, the ceiling, the floor and wall finishes. Furniture and the air conditioners themselves are priced separately, and installing one unit costs from 330 ₾.

Within the estimate, walls and points move the price the most. A plasterboard partition costs from 48 ₾ per m², and an electrical point, that is a socket, switch or light fitting, from 42 ₾. An open-plan room with few walls is closer to the lower end. An office of separate rooms with glass partitions and ducted air conditioning is closer to the upper end.

We send a preliminary estimate from a plan and photos within 24 hours on business days. The final cost is set after the site measurement, once the estimate is agreed. The price of each stage is written into the contract and does not rise unless the scope changes, and you pay stage by stage, after signing off each one. How the stages and sign-off work is explained on the page about how we work.