Week one - New Dental and Office Site

2010 has started off with a bang! New Site for Samera offices and The Neem Tree!

I plan on blogging about our progress in developing a new Neem Tree and Samera offices over the next few months at our new site in Surrey. I hope this will prove to be an interesting read for anyone interested in the trials and tribulations of opening a new dental practice plus offices for Samera.

Week One

This has been a really interesting and exciting week after Xmas, although i was supposed to be away, my trip was cancelled due to a few family reasons, i have been in constant discussion with designers, contractors and all manner of sorts of people who will help us achieve our objectives.

The first person we have taken on to deal with the project is Pete, he is our designer and also our project manager. We have learnt from previous experiences always hire a team that can do a much better job than we could. Pay the professionals for their expertise, don't try and do everything yourself, as it will rarely be as good as a professional!

He has drafted concept drawings for the offices and also is in the process of putting the drawings together for the dental practice too. Since the building is a grade 2 listed building, it is pretty old, we also have employed russell to be our structural engineer, design is important, but so is structure, so we don't have a failing building!

Problems we have encountered....

Such projects are fraught with issues and problems, just in week one we have experienced:

1. Problematic structure - since the building is 17th Century, trying to get the drawings of the building right, from under all the existing buildings has not been easy

2. Snow - No show of builders due to snow (kind of expected)

3. Police - A visit by the police.....more on this later!!!

4. Budget Management - Keeping the costs as low as possible! already some hidden unknown costs are appearing, so we will have to manage costs accordingly, keeping to a tight budget will be key here.

As I write the builders have already taken alot of the old debris off the walls away, tomorrow is a site visit, lets see how this goes!!