Küster Dental Weblog

I’m often asked, “When should I hire a dental office designer for my project?” My response is always, “Sooner rather than later.”

Think to yourself, “When do I want to be open and seeing patients in my newly remodeled or built-out space?” Then, back up from that date at least six months. So, for example, if you want to start seeing patients January 1st of 2011, then your project needs to get under way no later than 1 July of this year. Since the number of working days drops around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years, adding some more time in doesn’t hurt, so realistically you’d best be hiring your designer and getting your remodel or build-out in design by 1 June! That’s just around the corner!

Why does it take so long? Well, here is a rough breakdown of the 26 week timeline:
6 weeks for design
2 weeks for construction bids and contractor selection
9 weeks for ordering materials, state plan approval, and permits
8 weeks for construction
1 week for move in

The above timeline assumes that everything goes smoothly, all questions are answered promptly, and there are no major revisions or redesigns necessary. Think about it, how often do you think that happens?

If you are leasing a new space I recommend that you get your designer involved with the project while you are still looking at space options. As soon as you think you’ve narrowed your selection to a couple of spaces, take your dental office designer with you to look at them and get some feedback on what challenges and opportunities exist in the various choices to effectively communicate your interior branding message in the spaces. Your designer should also be able to discuss space planning issues and traffic flow issues for your various choices to help you make a final leasing decision. In a new lease situation time is of the essence, so the more involved your dental office designer is with the selection process before the clock starts ticking on when you have to start paying rent on the new space, the quicker a design can be created and the farther down the timeline you can be before this happens.

So, I’ve outlined an ideal situation above and that is just for a dental office remodel or build-out, if you are building a new building then you obviously need some more time. Also, since we don’t live in an ideal world, additional time is nice to have so decisions don’t have to feel rushed to keep the project on track.

So, if you’ve been thinking it would be nice to start 2011 in a new location or in a freshly remodeled dental office, “Have you hired your dental office designer yet?”

This entry was posted on 22 April 2010 at 4:50 pm and is filed under dental design, dental office design, interior branding, interior design with tags interior design, dental office design, dental office interior design, interior dental design, office design, dental design, dental interior design, interior design for dental clinic, interior dental office design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.