Modular and Prefab Construction Editing and Proofreading Services

In traditional construction a client can change their mind about a socket position until the plasterer arrives. In modular, that socket is inside a wall that was built six weeks ago in a factory two hundred miles away, and moving it means opening a finished unit, which costs more than the socket, the wall and the argument combined. The whole economics of the method rest on a date that traditional clients have never had to respect.

We edit what modular and offsite manufacturers produce — design freeze schedules and change deadline documentation, client-facing explanations of the offsite process, information required schedules and their consequences, change control procedures after freeze, factory production and quality documentation, tolerance and interface documentation between modules and site works, transport, craneage and installation method statements, site preparation requirements for the client's works, handover and warranty documentation split between factory and site, and commissioning and snagging processes for volumetric units. Our editors work on the deadline the whole method depends on.

The design freeze and change deadline document is where modular projects are either delivered or made expensive, and its failure is presenting a date without the consequence attached. A client who has been sent a programme with "design freeze" marked on it has been given a milestone; a client who has been told what a change costs on each side of that date has been given a decision. We work through these so the freeze is expressed as a series of item-level deadlines rather than one project date, since the structural layout, the service routes, the kitchen layout and the finishes all lock at different moments and telling a client everything locks in March is both false and unhelpful; so each deadline states what specifically must be decided by it, in the client's language — not "MEP design complete" but "where every socket, switch and light goes, room by room"; so the cost and time consequence of a change after each deadline is given as a range with a worked example, because an abstract warning does not survive a client who wants a different tap; so the small number of things that genuinely can still change late is named, as this is what makes the rest credible; so the mechanism for a late change is described including who authorises it and what it does to the production slot, given that a lost factory slot is often the real cost; and so the client is told what happens to the programme if a deadline is simply missed. Documents written this way protect the schedule that makes modular worth doing.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including designs, programmes and client information. We are editors rather than designers, manufacturers or project managers, and we offer no view on programme, production or cost. What we can do is make the deadline mean something to the person who has to respect it.