Temporary facilities
Temporary facilities are the services and structures a site needs while it is being built — power, lighting, water, heat, sanitation, fencing, and the site office.
Also written as temp facilities, temporary utilities, temp power.
Last updated
Reviewed by Eric Collin · President and Founder of Firmo Construction, 20+ years in preconstruction and bid evaluation
They are specified in Division 01 and usually priced by the general contractor as general conditions, but the boundary with the trades is genuinely negotiable and varies by project. Temporary power is the recurring example: the electrical contractor typically installs the temporary service, and who pays for the energy consumed is a separate question.
Because every trade depends on them and no trade owns them, they generate boundary gaps reliably. Temporary heat during winter concrete and drywall work is the expensive version — a cost that can run into real money and that each party can reasonably read as someone else's.
For comparison, the useful discipline is to ask what each bidder assumed rather than what it excluded. A proposal silent on temporary power has still made an assumption; it simply has not written it down, and the assumption is usually that someone else is providing it.
Temporary facilities also scale with schedule, like most general conditions. A three-month extension extends the fencing, the office, the sanitation, and the power with it, which is why they appear in nearly every delay claim.
- General conditions
General conditions are the project-specific costs of running a job that belong to no trade — supervision, the site office, temporary utilities, cleanup, and similar.
- General requirements
General requirements are the Division 01 specification sections that set the administrative and procedural rules of a contract — submittals, meetings, closeout, quality control, and site conduct.
- Hoisting and rigging
Hoisting and rigging is the lifting and placement of materials and equipment on site — cranes, hoists, forklifts — and the question of who provides and pays for it.
Catch every gap before you award
MyLevelBid reads every bid line by line, maps them to one scope, and flags what nobody carried.
Request a demo