Tenant Fit-Ups and Build-Outs in New Hampshire and Massachusetts

What a Tenant Fit-Up Covers Electrically

A fit-up is everything between the space a landlord hands over and the space a business can trade from. Electrically that usually means the panel and the sub-feed, the branch circuits, the lighting and controls, the receptacles and data, and the connections for whatever equipment the tenant is bringing.

What the landlord has provided varies enormously. Some spaces come with a panel, a meter and capped stubs. Others are a bare shell with a single feeder and nothing else. The first job on any fit-up is establishing exactly where the landlord's work stops, because that line decides the scope and it is frequently not where the lease says it is.

We do fit-ups across southern New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts: the Manchester millyard and the Elm Street corridor, downtown Nashua and the Daniel Webster Highway, Concord's Main Street and the Loudon Road retail, Portsmouth and Pease International Tradeport on the Seacoast, and over the state line in Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill, Methuen and Andover.

Both states are covered under separate licenses, which matters on the border more than people expect. Full detail on the geography is on our service area page.

Restaurant and Food Service Fit-Ups

Restaurants are the fit-up we do most and the one most contractors are least comfortable with, because the loads are heavy, the equipment schedule is long, and the inspection has a health department sitting alongside the electrical inspector.

A commercial kitchen is a genuinely large electrical load. Combi ovens, fryers, hoods with makeup air, walk-ins, warewashers and a dozen countertop items add up to more than most people expect, and a good proportion of it is three-phase. The hood interlock alone is a coordination job between the electrical, the mechanical and the fire suppression contractor.

The detail that catches new operators is that the front of house is the easy half. Lighting, receptacles and a point of sale run are straightforward. The kitchen is where the schedule, the service size and the timeline are actually decided, and our guide to planning the electrical for a restaurant fit-up sets out how that runs.

We have done restaurant work in Manchester and in the Merrimack Valley. Naming the customers needs their permission, so the pages do not do it, but the work is the reason food service is on this list at all.

Retail, Office and Medical Build-Outs

These are lighter loads than a kitchen and the challenge moves elsewhere: to the lighting design, the data infrastructure and the finish.

Retail lives on its lighting. The difference between a space that sells and one that does not is frequently the track, the accent lighting and the color temperature over the merchandise, and that is a design decision made before the fixtures are ordered rather than after. Commercial lighting covers what that involves.

Offices are receptacle density, floor boxes or poke-throughs where the desks land, and enough structured cabling that the layout is not locked forever. Medical suites add dedicated circuits for imaging and equipment, and frequently a requirement for specific receptacle types in patient care areas that a general office fit-up never touches.

What all three share is that the tenant's furniture layout is the electrical drawing. Until it exists, the rough-in is a guess, and a guess in a fit-up is a change order later.

Fit-Ups in Converted Mill and Older Commercial Buildings

A large share of the commercial space in this region is in buildings that were something else first, and that changes the job.

The Manchester millyard, the Amoskeag buildings, the mills along the Merrimack in Lowell and Lawrence, the brick blocks in downtown Nashua and Concord: these have been subdivided, rewired and re-tenanted repeatedly, sometimes over a century. What is behind the wall is rarely what the drawings say, and the drawings frequently do not exist.

The survey matters more than the plans in a building like that. Finding out what the existing feeder actually is, what the house panel has spare, and what previous tenants left abandoned in the ceiling changes the scope before a price means anything. Our guide to fitting out an older commercial building covers what typically gets found.

It also frequently turns into a conversation about the building's service and distribution rather than the unit's, because a building on its original service cannot carry four modern tenants regardless of what any one lease says.

The Equipment Schedule Decides the Electrical Design

This is the single most useful thing a tenant can produce early, and the single most common cause of a fit-up running late.

Every piece of equipment has a nameplate: voltage, phase, current, and whether it is hardwired or cord and plug. That list, building by building, is what the circuit schedule is built from, what the load calculation runs on, and what decides whether the existing supply is adequate. Without it the design is assumptions, and assumptions in a fit-up become rework.

The common pattern is that equipment gets ordered late, arrives with different specifications than the one that was priced, and the rough-in is already in the wall. Moving a circuit after drywall is not a small cost, and it is the part of a fit-up that most often blows a schedule.

Where equipment genuinely is not chosen yet, we run capacity and route to the location and leave the final connection until the nameplate exists, which is a planned gap rather than a surprise. Equipment and machine connections goes into the detail.

Permits, Inspections and Working in Two States

A fit-up is permitted and inspected by the authority having jurisdiction in that town, and the permit carries a master electrician's license. Austin Provencher holds New Hampshire master license 14569M and is separately licensed in Massachusetts.

That separation is the part businesses on the border miss. An electrical license does not travel across a state line. A contractor licensed only in New Hampshire cannot legally pull a permit in Lawrence, and one licensed only in Massachusetts cannot pull one in Nashua. For a tenant with sites in both states, or a landlord with a portfolio that straddles the line, holding both is the difference between one contractor and two.

Massachusetts and New Hampshire also inspect differently in practice, and a fit-up in Haverhill does not run identically to the same fit-up in Salem NH. Knowing which is which before the schedule is set is part of the job.

On a restaurant, the electrical inspection is not the only one that matters. The health inspection and the fire sign-off have their own requirements and their own sequence, and a certificate of occupancy waits for all of them.

Sequencing Around the Other Trades

On a fit-up the electrical contractor is rarely working alone, and the order is the thing that decides whether the job runs cleanly.

Rough-in happens after framing and before insulation and drywall, in coordination with plumbing and mechanical, all three competing for the same ceiling space. Under-slab and in-wall work has a window that closes and does not reopen cheaply. Trim and device work comes after paint. The final connections happen once the equipment lands.

Where there is a general contractor running the program we work to their schedule and flag the electrical dependencies early: the utility date, the equipment delivery, the inspection slots. New construction and GC work covers how that arrangement runs.

Where the tenant is running the fit-up themselves, which happens more on smaller retail and office spaces, we are frequently the ones flagging that the ceiling grid cannot go in yet.

Landlord Scope Against Tenant Scope

This is a lease question with an electrical answer, and it is worth resolving before anyone prices anything.

Typically the landlord provides the service, the meter and a panel or feeder to the unit, and the tenant does everything from there. But the line moves: some leases include a lighting allowance, some include the panel but not the feeder, and some hand over a space that a previous tenant fitted out and stripped.

Where a building is multi-tenant the metering arrangement matters too, because common area loads and house panels have to be separated from what a tenant pays for. Our guide to electrical in multi-tenant and mixed-use buildings covers how those get untangled, and property management work is the ongoing side of it.

We survey the space and say plainly what is there, what the lease appears to cover and where the gap is. That is usually a short conversation, and it is a great deal cheaper than discovering the gap at rough-in.