A standard, not a phrase
Most office and retail buildings have a base building standard — sometimes a written document, sometimes just what the landlord has always delivered. The strip-out scope should point at it. Where it does not exist in writing, the scope has to do the job the standard would have done and list what stays, element by element.
What almost always stays
- Structure, slab, columns, shear walls and the exterior envelope.
- Base building services to a demarcation: the riser, the panel, the valve, the duct main.
- Fire alarm devices and sprinkler mains and branches that serve the base layout — modified, not removed, when the tenant layout changed them.
- Washrooms and common corridors where they are base building rather than suite.
What almost always goes
- Tenant partitions, doors and frames, glazing, millwork and built-ins.
- Tenant finishes: flooring, wall finishes, feature ceilings, specialty lighting.
- Suite-specific services: data and cabling, tenant HVAC branches and diffusers, supplemental cooling, kitchen and lab services, security.
- Signage, blinds, and anything fixed to the envelope that the lease says is the tenant's.
The grey areas
- Ceilings. Some standards deliver a base T-bar ceiling with base lighting; some deliver open-to-deck. If the outgoing tenant installed a new ceiling, is it now base building or does it come out? Name it.
- Flooring. Carpet and tile usually go. Raised access floor, polished concrete and heritage terrazzo usually stay. A tile bed on a thick-set mortar is a demolition item in its own right and should be called out.
- HVAC. Main distribution stays; tenant branches, diffusers and controls usually go. The demarcation is a duct, not a floor, and it has to be marked.
- Data. Abandoned cabling is often required to be removed by code and by the landlord; leaving it in the ceiling is not "base building", it is a problem for the next fit-out.
- Fastener holes, anchors and patching. Pulled or ground flush is a demolition standard. Patched and painted is a finishing standard. Say which.
How we handle it
At the walk we mark the demarcations with you — on drawings where they exist, on the walls where they do not — and write what stays into the quote. The space is handed over broom-clean and trade-ready, which for a base-building strip-out means the next tenant's contractor can start measuring on day one instead of clearing what the last one left.