DHL Headquarters

Why an occupied corporate office is a harder place to work than an empty one

A corporate office does not close for a finish upgrade. Staff arrive in the morning, the elevators have to run, the lobby has to look like somewhere clients are welcome, and every hour of noise, dust or blocked corridor is charged against somebody's working day. That constraint, rather than the surfaces themselves, is what shapes the entire job.

It also changes what finished means. In a vacant building you can work in any order and clean up at the end. In an occupied one, every single day has to end in a state a tenant can walk into: no exposed substrate, no solvent smell in a conference room booked for eight the next morning, no elevator lobby that reads as a construction zone to a visitor arriving for a meeting.

DHL's office building in Plantation, Florida was one of those. Elevator car interiors, walls, columns, panels and doors were all showing their age at the same time, in a building that stayed fully operational for the whole time our crews were in it.

What we did at DHL in Plantation, Florida

Resurface Wraps refinished the elevator car interiors, walls, columns, wall panels and doors at DHL's Plantation office in a light oak architectural film, sequencing the work around normal business hours so the building never came out of service.

The scope reads as a list of unrelated surfaces, and that is exactly the point. Walls, columns, doors and cab interiors are not separate projects to the person walking from the front door to a desk. They are one continuous impression, and refinishing three of the four leaves the fourth announcing how old the building actually is. A corporate interior program is judged on the surface that was left out.

What was actually difficult

What the elevator code actually requires of a cab interior finish

ASME A17.1, the Safety Code for Elevators and Escalators, requires that materials exposed to the car interior be metal or else have a flame spread rating of 0 to 75 and a smoke development rating of 0 to 450, determined by ASTM E84, UL 723, NFPA 255 or CAN/ULC-S102.2. Those material requirements sit at A17.1 2.14.2.1, under Passenger Car Enclosures. Subsection numbering below that has moved between editions, so cite the edition your authority having jurisdiction has actually adopted rather than a number copied from a blog.

Read the band carefully, because a great deal of marketing gets it wrong in both directions. Under the interior finish classes used by the building code, Class A is a flame spread index of 0 to 25 and Class B is 26 to 75, and both carry the same smoke developed cap of 450. The general A17.1 car interior band of 0 to 75 therefore spans Class A and Class B, and a Class B material meets the general requirement. That is what the code says. It is not necessarily what your AHJ or your elevator maintenance contractor will accept, and either can require Class A by local amendment or by company policy, so confirm before anything is ordered.

The 0 to 75 band is also not the whole requirement. A17.1 carries additional and stricter provisions for particular material types and for padded protective linings, and the cab floor is a separate conversation with a separate test: floor covering, underlayment and adhesive are judged on critical radiant flux of not less than 0.45 W/cm² under ASTM E648, which is a flooring test. Architectural film is not a flooring product, so cab floors are not part of a resurfacing scope.

One point decides whether a submittal survives review more often than any other. The test result has to describe the material in its end use configuration, meaning the film on the substrate it will actually be bonded to, with the adhesive that will actually be used. A flame spread number for a film tested on one substrate is not automatically a number for the same film on a different one.

None of this is the fire door conversation. Flame spread and smoke developed indices describe interior finish behavior, not the performance of a rated opening, and we set out what an ASTM E84 class does and does not mean in our explanation of whether architectural film is Class A fire rated. Florida has adopted the 2019 edition of A17.1 by rule, later editions exist including 2022 and 2025, and editions do change, so confirm the adopted edition with your AHJ and read the current manufacturer data sheet for the specific product before anything is specified.

Whether a cab refinish needs an elevator alteration permit in Broward County

Florida has no express exemption for cosmetic elevator cab refinishing, so the honest answer is that it is a determination, not a given. Rule 61C-5.006 of the Florida Administrative Code triggers an alteration permit for any remodel, change to or addition of fixtures or components in the elevator cab that either requires a test under ASME A17.1 or meets the definition of alteration in Section 399.01(1), Florida Statutes. That statutory definition is broad: any change or addition to the vertical conveyance other than maintenance, repair or replacement. The rule text names remodel and change to the elevator cab specifically, and no line in it carves out finishes. The one carve-out the rule does give is that a replacement, as defined in Rule 61C-5.008, does not require an alteration permit, and refinishing is not a replacement.

Broward County adds a second question on top of the first. Broward is one of only five jurisdictions in Florida that have contracted elevator regulation from the state rather than being covered directly by the Bureau of Elevator Safety, alongside the City of Miami, Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County and the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District. So for a Plantation address, the first thing to establish is who the authority having jurisdiction actually is, and the second is what that authority treats cab refinishing as. Broward County's own elevator permit application is instructive: it carries Cab Refinish as a distinct work type alongside Alteration - cab and Alteration - major, which tells you the county has a category for this work rather than treating it as invisible. We get both answers in writing before a date goes in the calendar. The statewide requirements, inspection process and Certificate of Operation rules are set out in our Florida elevator cab refinishing and code guide, and the local picture is on our Plantation elevator wraps page.

Pulling one car out of an office elevator bank

Taking one car out of a bank of four costs the building a quarter of its elevator handling capacity and lengthens the up peak interval by at least a third. The standard up peak method in elevator traffic analysis defines the interval as round trip time divided by the number of cars, and five minute handling capacity as inversely proportional to that interval, so removing one car from a bank of L multiplies the interval by L over L minus 1 and cuts capacity by one Lth. A three car bank loses a third of its capacity and gains half again on its interval.

Those are floors, not forecasts. The method holds round trip time constant, and in practice the remaining cars run fuller, make more stops and take longer per trip, so the real degradation is worse than the ratio suggests. If the bank was sized with no headroom to begin with, the lobby queue stops behaving like an interval at all and starts growing with the length of the peak. Either way it arrives at 8:45am, which is the moment when everyone in the building forms an opinion about the renovation. That is why cab work is sequenced one car at a time, in the shortest window the finish will allow, and why an approach that keeps the car in service for most of the day is worth more to a facilities director than a slightly better unit price.

Weight is the other question people ask, and the honest answer is that it is smaller than feared but not closed. A17.1 8.7.2.15.2 sets its heaviest threshold at an increase or decrease of more than 5 percent in the sum of the car deadweight and the rated load, which is a large denominator, and a film a few thousandths of an inch thick does not approach it. It does not follow that nothing applies. The code's smaller-change provision, 8.7.2.15.1, sits below that, and published regulator guidance for the harmonized code puts its exemption at a cumulative increase of roughly 24 lb rather than at any percentage. Above that line a car may have to be weighed before and after, an auxiliary data tag posted showing what was added, and a no-load test run before the car returns to service. A full cab wrap can land near that line. We weigh the material and settle the question with the elevator contractor and the AHJ rather than assuming it away.

Panel re-cladding is a different product with a different answer. Elevator World has described new cars turned over as empty shells and finished out later, with as much as 1,000 lb of interior finishes added afterwards and not always reflected on the crosshead data plate. Re-cladding belongs in that class of work; a film does not. If a proposal is described loosely as a cab interior upgrade, establish which of the two it actually is before anyone signs it.

The car operating panel, and what film never covers

Architectural film does not go over anything a passenger with a disability relies on to use the car. The 2010 ADA Standards require raised characters and braille designations to sit immediately to the left of the control button they apply to, with an exception at 407.4.7.1.2 where space on an existing car operating panel precludes it, in which case the markings go as near the control as possible. Tactile symbols and characters must also sit adjacent to the emergency two way communication device. Covering, filming over or displacing any of those markings makes them non-compliant, which is a real consequence rather than a stylistic one. Panels and fixtures come out or get masked. They do not get wrapped.

Cab dimensions themselves are not an issue at film thicknesses. The 2010 ADA Standards set minimum inside car dimensions in Table 407.4.1, with an exception for existing car configurations that provide at least 16 square feet of clear floor area, 54 inches of clear depth and 36 inches of clear width. A few thousandths of an inch per wall does not move a car across either line. Thick panel re-cladding on a car already sitting near the minimum is a different matter and should be checked against both the table and that exception before it is ordered.

One finish reading correctly across five different substrates

Light oak on a cab wall, on a painted gypsum column, on a hollow metal door, on a millwork panel and on a plaster wall is five different prep problems producing one appearance. Each substrate has its own failure mode. Painted gypsum can release if the existing coating is chalking. Hollow metal needs degreasing rather than sanding. Millwork brings existing edge banding and reveals that decide where a seam can land. A column has an outside corner every few feet, and outside corners are where an unhappy film shows first.

Grain direction is the part clients notice without being able to name it. On a wood pattern, a run of columns and a run of doors seen together in raking lobby light will look wrong if the grain is a few degrees inconsistent, even when every individual surface is clean. Setting the grain convention for the whole building before the first panel goes on costs an afternoon. Discovering it after 40 surfaces is a re-do.

Why the numbers look like that

The $190,000 is the difference between resurfacing DHL's existing surfaces and replacing them. Replacement here is not one line item. It is a new cab interior package, new door slabs with the hardware transferred or replaced, column and wall rework where new material does not land on the old substrate cleanly, disposal, freight, and the labor to install all of it in an occupied building at premium hours.

The 6 to 7 months is lead time and downtime rather than installation time. Elevator cab interiors are made to order. In a 2019 Elevator World profile, the CEO of cab and door manufacturer Columbia Elevator Products put the trajectory of customer expectations this way: "Decades ago, 16-week lead times were acceptable. Then, it was 12 weeks, then eight. These days, customers are pushing for maximum six-week lead times." That is one manufacturer speaking about the fabrication queue alone, before approvals, submittals, the elevator contractor's own schedule, and doors, millwork and site work are sequenced behind it. Resurfacing removes the queue entirely, because nothing is fabricated and nothing leaves the building.

One honest caveat on those figures. There is no published, independent industry benchmark comparing cab interior replacement downtime with refinishing downtime, and the numbers circulating in vendor material are vendor claims. The $190,000 and the 6 to 7 months are this project's numbers, measured against this project's replacement scope in this building. Treat them as a worked example of the shape of the saving, not as a rate card. Real numbers for a different building depend on its scope, its substrates and its elevator contractor, which is why we scope before we price. Our indicative ranges and assumptions are on the elevator wrap and commercial door wrap pages.

When resurfacing a corporate office is the wrong answer

Resurfacing is the wrong answer whenever the substrate is the actual problem. Delaminating veneer, water damaged gypsum, corroded metal and doors that no longer close and latch are not finish problems, and film applied over any of them buys a year and then fails visibly. The same applies to a cab already scheduled for modernization: if the fixtures, controls and entrances are being replaced anyway, the interior belongs in that project rather than ahead of it, because the second job will disturb the first.

Two more cases. Cab floors are outside the scope, because flooring is governed by a different test and film is not a flooring product. And a labeled fire door is never a default yes, because a rated opening is covered by a specific listing for a specific door construction or it does not receive film at all, which we set out in detail in the Best Western Spokane hotel door program.

Resurfacing is the right answer in the much more common case that describes most corporate interiors: sound substrates, working hardware, and a finish palette that was specified fifteen years ago and now dates the whole building. For how this applies across an office portfolio, see our corporate solutions page, or get in touch with a floor plan and we will scope it.

Frequently asked questions