A national home-improvement retailer brought us in to renovate the restrooms across two of its Ohio distribution centers — a seven-figure program spanning both facilities. The brief was straightforward: take the existing restrooms down to the studs and rebuild them right. The complication was that neither building could stop. Distribution centers run on freight, and freight does not wait for a renovation.
The scope
Each restroom got a full rebuild — selective demolition back to the framing, new framing where it was needed, fresh plumbing and electrical, tile, new toilet partitions, and acoustical ceiling. A restroom renovation reads as a small job on paper. Doing it inside an operating distribution center, on the schedule the building runs on, is what made it real work.
Why it worked
The buildings stayed live the entire time. That meant we could never take every restroom offline at once — there had to be facilities available to a working shift at all hours. So the program was phased: a defined set of restrooms down at a time, sequenced so the building always had coverage, with each phase closed out clean before the next one opened. Crews worked around shift changes and freight flow rather than expecting the operation to work around them.
That sequencing discipline is the difference between a renovation that disrupts a facility and one that the facility barely notices. The retailer was not just buying tile and partitions — it was buying a contractor that understood a distribution center cannot afford to lose its restrooms, and planned the work accordingly.
The result
Both distribution centers were delivered successfully, on the phasing plan, with the operation running the whole way through. The relationship expanded out of it — the kind of outcome that only happens when a client comes away trusting that you can work inside their building without becoming a problem for it.