The old surface comes off, and the slab is the actual job
Removal is where a commercial scope reveals itself. Under a surface that has been in place for years there is adhesive residue, previous patching, and slab that has moved, cracked or been cut for utilities.
At that point the work is no longer flooring, it is restoring a substrate to a condition that can receive one. Patched, skimmed, then coated. The slab is finished before the first plank arrives, and that order is not negotiable, because a commercial floor carries traffic that will find every shortcut taken underneath it.
This is also the part of the schedule most likely to be underestimated by a bid that was written from a drawing instead of from an opened floor.
One floor completely finished before the next one opens
The method we use in occupied buildings is simple to state and demanding to hold: a floor is finished, the debris goes out, and only then does the next one open.
Holding that line does two things. It keeps the number of disrupted areas at one instead of several, which is what the people using the building actually experience. And it forces every trade to close out properly, because there is no next area to move into while the current one stays unfinished.
Our Daytona Beach commercial record documents this sequence floor by floor, from the fourth down.
The first row governs the whole run
In a corridor the eye has nothing to look at except the line of the floor, and it reads that line for the entire length of the walk.
The first row is set to that line, and everything laid after it answers to the first row. Where a corridor has to meet another corridor, or where a run has to pick up on the other side of an elevator lobby, the joint is planned rather than discovered.
A commercial floor is judged from the far end of a hallway, not from a sample held at arm's length.