Shop refurbishment that respects your opening date

What does a shop refurbishment usually involve?

Most retail refits start with taking out what no longer fits: old display walls, a counter in the wrong place, a tired suspended ceiling, flooring that has seen years of foot traffic. Once the unit is back to a clean base, the new layout is built on top of it.

• Strip-out of fittings, partitions and finishes that will not be reused, with debris removed from site.
• New partitions in plasterboard for the stockroom, fitting rooms, a small office or a staff area.
• Ceilings rebuilt or repaired, often with access hatches and a lighting cove over display areas.
• Electrics adapted for new lighting, tills and signage, by authorised partner installers.
• Floors chosen for heavy use, and wall finishes that survive daily contact with stock and trolleys.
• Painting, fitting and cleaning before the shopfitters or your own team bring in furniture.

Where the unit already works reasonably well, the job can be much smaller. A refit should match the business, not the other way round.

How is a retail refit different from renovating a home?

Three things change. The first is time: every day the shop stays closed costs rent without revenue, so sequencing matters more than in a home. The second is wear: a shop floor takes more traffic in a month than a hallway does in years, so materials are chosen differently. The third is the paperwork around the activity, which in a home rarely exists.

There is also the frontage. In a home, the façade is usually off-limits; in a shop, the entrance, glazing and signage are part of the business. Changes there involve the building’s owners’ community and often the town hall. We build the interior and coordinate with the glazing and signage specialists you choose, once those approvals are in place. Our guide on shop works and the owners’ community explains where the limits usually are.

Which decisions should be made before the works start?

Most delays on a shop refit come from decisions taken too late. Before we start building, it helps to have settled:

1. The layout: where the counter, fitting rooms, stockroom and staff area go, and how customers move through the space.
2. The lighting plan: general light, accent light on products and the position of each fitting, since it decides how the ceiling is built.
3. The finishes: floor, wall finishes and colours, with samples approved rather than described.
4. The specialist packages: who supplies the shopfitting, air conditioning, security and signage, and when they need access.
5. The paperwork: what your technician has filed or applied for, and what that scope allows.

If some choices are still open, we can sequence the job so the early stages go ahead while the later ones are decided — but we will tell you what each open decision puts at risk.

Who is responsible for the licence?

The business owner. Depending on the activity, the size of the unit and the works, a town hall may ask for a declaración responsable, a communication or a licence, and some activities need a technical project from an architect or engineer. Nationally, Ley 12/2012 removed the prior municipal licence for many retail activities in premises below a sales-floor threshold, which later amendments raised to 750 m², replacing it with a declaración responsable. Whether your activity and your works fall within that framework, and what your town requires, must be checked for your case (to be verified).

We do not file licences or declarations. What we do is make sure the building work matches the scope that has been approved or declared, so the paperwork and the site tell the same story. The licences guide sets out the verified basics with their sources.

Can the shop stay open during the refurbishment?

Sometimes, with planning. A refit can be divided into zones, with dust screens and a protected route for customers, so that part of the shop keeps trading. Noisy tasks such as cutting or drilling can be grouped into hours when the shop is closed, if the building and the community allow work at those times.

It is not always realistic. When the whole floor or the whole ceiling is being replaced, trading in the middle of it is neither safe nor pleasant for customers. We would rather tell you that at the quoting stage than discover it halfway through. The guide on planning a refit around trading covers the options in more detail.

What drives the cost of a shop refit?

We do not publish prices, because they depend almost entirely on the unit and the brief. The main factors are how much has to be stripped out, whether the existing ceiling and electrics can be reused, the lighting specification, the type of floor, the number of partitions and toilets, access for deliveries and debris, and whether part of the work happens outside normal hours.

The quote lists each task separately with its measurement, so you can see where the money goes and decide what to keep, simplify or postpone. The article on fit-out cost factors explains each one, and presupuestoreforma.eu covers renovation pricing more broadly.

How do we get started?

Send us photos of the unit — frontage, interior, ceiling, electrical board, any toilets — together with the approximate floor area and a line on your activity. If your architect or designer already has drawings, include them. We reply with a first assessment and, if it makes sense, arrange a visit to measure and prepare the itemised quote.

If the unit is still a bare shell rather than a former shop, the page on shell unit fit-out is the better starting point.

Official sources

• Ley 12/2012 on urgent measures to liberalise retail and certain services (text, Ministerio de Hacienda)
• Chronology of amendments to Ley 12/2012 – surface threshold raised to 750 m² by Ley 20/2013