Getting materials to the island

The chain

Six handovers, each a point where the programme can stop.

1. Order. Supplier lead time. Controllable, and the one most often left too late.
2. Mainland consolidation. Getting items to the port and combined into a shipment. Controllable with planning.
3. Port cut-off. A fixed time before sailing. Miss it by an hour and you miss the boat by a day or more.
4. The crossing. Weather-dependent and outside anyone's control.
5. Unloading at Athinios. Port capacity and timing, and the road up from the port.
6. The final haul. From where the lorry stops to where the material is needed — which on much of the island is the hard part.

The first two are managed by ordering discipline. The last one is managed by access planning. The three in the middle are managed by float in the programme, because they cannot be managed any other way.

What a missed sailing actually costs

This is the point owners most consistently underestimate, so it is worth spelling out with a concrete example.

A shipment of blockwork misses Tuesday's sailing. The obvious cost is two days until the next crossing with space. The real cost is larger:

• The masonry crew booked for Wednesday has no work, and they do not wait — they go to another site, and their next availability may be ten days out.
• The trade that follows masonry was booked against the original date and now also slips.
• Material already on site for the following stage sits taking up space on a site that has none.
• The next sailing with space may be later than the next sailing, because freight capacity in season is contested.

A two-day shipping delay routinely becomes a two-week programme delay. This is the entire reason island programmes carry visible float, and why a programme without it is a work of fiction.

Ordering discipline

The single highest-value activity on an island project, and the one most often neglected.

1. Identify long-lead items in the first month. Joinery, glazing, sanitaryware, specific tiles, lifts, pool plant, anything manufactured to order.
2. Freeze those decisions early, even while the rest of the specification is still moving. Ordering against a frozen sub-set is what saves the programme.
3. Order with margin. Breakage, rejection and shortfall are normal. Ordering exactly the scheduled quantity is how a job stops at ninety-five per cent.
4. Consolidate shipments. Fewer, fuller crossings beat many small ones.
5. Confirm the access route before ordering large items. A slab or a bath that cannot physically reach the property is an expensive lesson.
6. Keep a delivery schedule against the programme, not a shopping list.

The last two hundred metres

Where the lorry stops, the cost structure changes completely.

On an access-restricted property, material moves by barrow, by hand or by mule. So does the waste. So does the spoil from any excavation. It is slow, it is labour-intensive, and it applies to essentially everything.

Two practical responses reduce it:

• Specify for the route. A jointed worktop instead of a single slab. Smaller unit sizes. Components that can be assembled on site rather than carried assembled.
• Reuse on site. Spoil as fill behind retaining structures, reclaimed stone back into the building. Every unit that stays is one nobody carries twice.

Waste, the half nobody prices

Demolition arisings, excavated spoil, packaging and offcuts all leave the island by the same chain in reverse.

On a stepped-lane property, removing waste costs roughly what bringing material in costs, and there is usually more of it than owners expect — a modest cave excavation generates a great deal of tuff, and a strip-out generates a great deal of everything.

Any quotation with a suspiciously low disposal figure is worth questioning, including on where the arisings are actually going. We provide the documentation for disposal as a matter of course.

Plant and equipment, which is a separate problem

Material is the visible half. Getting machines to a site is the other one, and it constrains the design rather than just the programme.

• Excavators and breakers have to reach the plot. Where they cannot, excavation is by hand — which changes the rate by an order of magnitude and sometimes changes what is feasible at all.
• Concrete trucks and pumps determine how a frame can be poured. Where they cannot reach, the structure gets designed around smaller pours and more joints. That is a structural design input, decided before the drawings are finished.
• Cranes and hoists need somewhere to stand and something to stand on. On a stepped property below a road, setting up a hoist is a job in itself.
• Scaffolding arrives as loose tube and board and is carried in like everything else. See scaffolding.
• Breakdowns are a bigger problem here. A machine that fails on the mainland is swapped the same day; here it may be a crossing away, so plant redundancy on a critical activity is worth planning.

What to do about it as an owner

Five things genuinely within your control, in order of how much they save.

1. Decide finishes early. The single biggest lever. Every long-lead item frozen in month two rather than month six removes a programme risk.
2. Accept a substitute when a substitute is equivalent. A tile with a fourteen-week lead time and a similar one available locally are not the same decision on an island.
3. Do not free-issue material unless you can commit the date. Owner-supplied goods arriving late is the most common owner-driven delay we see.
4. Ask where the float is. A programme with no visible float against shipping will slip, and you should know that before signing rather than in month five.
5. Design for reuse. Spoil retained on site, stone reclaimed and put back. It saves the freight in both directions.