Bouygues took on the refurbishment of 450 apartments in Paris and used the Liftroller system to get materials into them. The buildings are the usual Parisian arrangement: narrow streets out the front, nowhere to lay down, and hundreds of individual units each needing its own small delivery on its own day.
The site
Volume is what makes a job like this hard, not any single lift. Four hundred and fifty apartments means the same handling task repeated hundreds of times, so anything clumsy in the method gets multiplied until it eats the programme. A method that costs ten extra minutes a unit costs you weeks across the job.
Paris adds its own constraints. Streets are tight, kerb space is contested, the buildings are old and often protected, and the stairs and lifts were built for residents rather than for pallets of board. In a lot of blocks the widest way in is the window, not the door.
The apartments also come with finished surfaces that have to survive the work and neighbours who are still living there while it happens. Dragging material up a common stair is slow, noisy and hard on the building, and every scuff on a landing is another item on someone's defects list.
What they used
The Liftroller Wall is the piece that solves the way in. It is a mobile loading platform rated to 1,200 kg that locks into an existing window or facade opening, assembles in roughly ten to fifteen minutes without tools, and uses a patented lock so the facade is not damaged. On a job with hundreds of repeat setups, that assembly time is the whole argument, because the platform has to move from opening to opening with the work rather than being built once and left.
Inside the units, Liftroller Floor forms the roller line that takes a load off the hook and onto the slab, and the E Wagon shifts up to 1,200 kg along a floor on remote control. For board in particular, our page on plasterboard handling explains why getting the full pack to the room beats breaking it down at the entrance and carrying it in sheets.
How it worked on site
Materials land at the opening on the floor they belong to. The pack comes off the platform, onto the floor and across to the room, which takes out the stair carry and the lift queue in one move. When that floor is finished the platform comes out, moves up or along, and locks into the next opening.
Repetition is what makes it work. The crew learn one setup and then do it hundreds of times, and the delivery method stops being a decision that gets remade on every unit by whoever happens to be on the gate that morning.
What it changed
Bouygues ended up with a method that scaled with the job rather than one that got worse as the count went up. It coped with the street constraints, it held up over a long programme, and it cut out the manual handling that a job of that size would otherwise pile onto the crews.
The economics of loading in at height instead of craning to the ground and carrying up are set out in our cost per lift comparison. If your Sydney job has the same shape, a repeat refurbishment with no room out the front, talk to our team and we will look at it with you.
