How is a project delivered on a site with no room for materials or plant?

On an inner suburban school, a council facility on a small parcel or a site hemmed in by operating buildings, the construction area is frequently smaller than the building being worked on.

Which makes logistics the governing constraint on the programme rather than the construction itself.

The constraint has to be established before the programme is written

The useful questions are asked at tender rather than at site establishment.

Where can a truck stop, and for how long. Where can plant be positioned, and what can it reach from there. Where can materials sit between delivery and installation. Where do the workforce park, change and eat. Where does the waste go, and how often is it removed.

On a constrained site several of those answers are "nowhere", and that changes the method. A programme written on the assumption of a laydown area that does not exist will not be achieved regardless of how well the work is executed.

Just-in-time delivery

The primary answer, and it is a scheduling discipline rather than a technique.

Materials arrive on the day they are installed, in the quantity to be installed, in the order of installation. Which means a delivery booking system, a nominated unloading position, a time slot for each delivery, and a crew ready to receive it.

The cost of getting it wrong is high in both directions: a delivery with nowhere to go blocks the street, and a delivery that fails to arrive stops the crew. So the schedule carries less float than on an open site and it is managed daily rather than weekly.

On a live site the delivery windows are further restricted by the operating programme, because a truck cannot arrive during school drop-off or during an event. Those restrictions are set out in [traffic management and deliveries to a live site](/answers/traffic-management-and-deliveries-to-a-live-site).

Move work off the site

The most effective single decision available.

Prefabricated elements arrive complete and are installed rather than built, which removes both the materials and the trade time from the site. Joinery assembled in a workshop, prefabricated service modules, pre-cut and labelled framing, and preassembled balustrade or fencing sections all reduce what has to be stored and handled.

The same logic applies to cutting and waste. Material cut off site produces no offcuts on site, which matters when there is nowhere to put a bin, and it connects to [waste management and recycling on site](/answers/waste-management-and-recycling-on-site).

Off-site storage with a scheduled shuttle to the site is the fallback where prefabrication is not available, and it has a cost that belongs in the tender rather than appearing as a variation.

Plant selected for the footprint

A constrained site rules out the plant that would be chosen on an open one.

Smaller excavators with reduced tail swing. Compact loaders. Mobile cranes positioned once and reaching the whole site, or a smaller crane with multiple set-ups. Truck-mounted concrete placement rather than a separate pump and agitator.

Each choice trades capacity for access, which means more cycles and a longer duration for the same quantity. That is a programme consequence to be planned rather than absorbed.

Crane positions are the critical item and they are confirmed against real clearances including overhead lines, as in [working at height on occupied buildings](/answers/working-at-height-on-occupied-buildings).

Vertical and temporary storage

Where there is no ground area, the available space is often above or inside.

Stacked and racked storage within the hoarded area. A temporary store inside a part of the building that has been decanted, which is one of the uses of the arrangements in [decanting and temporary accommodation during works](/answers/decanting-and-temporary-accommodation-during-works). Containers positioned where they can stay, accepting the loss of the area they occupy.

Anything stored on a slab has to be checked against the slab's capacity, because stacked material concentrates load in a way the building was not designed for.

Hoarding and the site boundary

On a constrained site the hoarding line is the most contested dimension on the project.

Every metre taken for construction is taken from the operating facility, and every metre left out of the construction zone is a metre the work has to do without. Which means the line is agreed with the client, drawn on a plan, and changed only by agreement rather than by whoever needs the space that day.

Where the hoarding encroaches on a footpath or a road, it is a permit matter with the authority, handled as described in [council approvals and road opening permits](/answers/how-does-monument-handle-council-approvals-and-road-opening-permits), and the establishment is covered in [site establishment, hoarding and fencing](/answers/site-establishment-hoarding-and-fencing).

What this means for the client

A constrained site costs more per unit of work and takes longer, and both are knowable at tender rather than emerging later.

Which is why the logistics plan is part of the tender submission on these projects, and why a price that does not account for the constraint is a price that will be revisited. The early involvement that lets this be planned properly is the subject of [early contractor involvement and cost planning](/answers/early-contractor-involvement-and-cost-planning).