Shop and office fitouts are a different animal to house work. The carpentry's the easy bit, honestly. What catches people out is everything wrapped around it — the lease clock ticking, trading hours you can't touch, centre management running their own rulebook, and a few other trades all after the same square metres at once. We've done enough of these round the Gong to know that finishing on time matters every bit as much as how the joinery turns out.
I'm Dave. All Round Carpentry does fitout carpentry across the Illawarra, Helensburgh down to Nowra and into the Shoalhaven. You deal with me start to finish — same bloke who quotes it runs it on site. We're fully licensed and insured too, which on a commercial job is usually the first bit of paper a property manager or centre asks for, often before you've had a chance to unload the ute.
The build — counters, partitions, joinery
Most fitouts come down to a handful of things, done properly. Sales counters and reception desks. Partitions — stud or framed — to carve an open tenancy into offices, fitting rooms or a back-of-house. Shelving and display joinery that has to carry weight and still look the part under shop lighting. And the food side, which is its own world: café benches, service bars, and the cabinetry that hides all the gear customers never see.
We build to suit the trade. A retail counter cops a hammering all day, every day, so it gets proper framing and a hard-wearing top — not the sort of thing that chips inside a month and has you ringing me back. Café bars are dealing with water, heat and constant wiping, so the substrate and finish get picked for exactly that. And where timber's on show — a feature bar front, a shelf run, a reception face — we use the right stuff. Spotted gum, a laminate that lines up with your branding, whatever the shopfitter's drawings call out.
The jobs we get asked about most:
- Sales counters, reception desks and POS joinery
- Partition walls to split or reshape a tenancy
- Shelving, display units and storage fit to the space
- Café benches, service bars and back-bar cabinetry
Got a designer or shopfitter with plans drawn up already? We build to those. Just a rough idea and a floor plan? We'll work it out with you on site.
Working around your trade
The bit that separates a clean fitout from a painful one is how it's run on the day. A shop that's still trading can't have a dusty saw going off at 11am with customers walking through the door. So we stage it. The loud, messy work happens after close or before open, and the quieter fit-off gets done during the day where nobody even notices we're there.
Centres and arcades are stricter again — they've got their own contractor hours, inductions and access rules, and they won't bend them for you. Tell me which centre you're in and what management actually lets you do, and I'll build the program around it. Beats getting pulled up halfway through with a half-built bar and nowhere to put it. Strata buildings and shared offices round Wollongong and Shellharbour are the same story: noise windows, lift bookings, the lot.
And we keep the site tidy as we go. Not me being precious — on a live tenancy a pile of offcuts is a trip hazard and a bad look for your customers, so we clean down at the end of every day and keep the work zone fenced off from the shop floor. You won't come in to find your shopfront blocked.
Make-goods and the lease clock
The other end of a fitout is getting out of one. We get a fair bit of end-of-lease make-good work from property managers and tenants — stripping out the old fitout, patching walls and floors, capping off services and handing the space back the way the lease spells out.
Reading the make-good clause is where it's won or lost. One landlord wants bare shell. The next wants it left tenantable, fit-out and all. A few want specific bits kept right where they are and everything else gone. Send me the clause and I'll quote to that and nothing more, so there's no blue at handover and no money held back over a strip-out that didn't get finished.
On timing, I won't muck you about. A fitout that runs late costs you trading days or holds up the next tenant coming in, so I give you a real program up front and hold to it. If something has to move, you'll hear it from me early. Not on handover day.
Got a tenancy to fit out, a café to build or a make-good coming due? Give me a call on 0414 007 351 and we'll sort out a free quote. Happy to swing past, have a look at the space and the plans, and talk it through. No pressure either way.
Common questions
- Can you work around our trading hours?
- Yeah, that's most fitouts down here. We'll do the noisy, dusty gear after close or before open and keep the rest to staged work that doesn't shut the doors. If you're in a centre with set contractor hours, give me the rules early and I'll plan the job around them.
- Do you handle end-of-lease make-goods for property managers?
- We do a fair bit of make-good work. Stripping out a previous tenant's fitout, patching walls and floors back, capping off services and getting the space back to bare shell or whatever the lease spells out. Send me the make-good clause and I'll quote to exactly that.
- How long does a shop fitout take?
- Depends on the size and how much is custom joinery. A small retail counter and shelving fitout might be a week; a full café with a bar, benches and partitions is more like two to four weeks. I'll give you a real timeframe and stick to it once I've seen the space and the plans.