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The former Costco site in Docklands is being converted into Melbourne Pathology’s new Centre of Excellence — more than 10,000 square metres of laboratory space capable of processing 200,000 tests a day, doubling the company’s operational footprint and creating 250 ongoing jobs.
A conversion of this kind starts with the slab. A retail warehouse floor is not a laboratory floor, and every service the new building needs has to be cut into concrete that was never designed to carry it.
Austral Contractors was engaged by FDC Construction & Fitout to prepare the existing slab for its new use.
Floor grinding — 15,000+ sqm. We ground the full floor area to remove the existing coatings, adhesives and surface contamination and to open the concrete to a consistent profile for the new flooring system. On a pathology facility the finished floor has to be seamless and cleanable, which means the substrate beneath it has to be uniform across every square metre. At this scale, consistency is the whole job.
Floor shaving — bathroom setdowns. We shaved the slab down to form setdowns at the wet areas, cutting a controlled recess to the depth required for waterproofing and floor build-up while finishing flush with the surrounding surface.
Core drilling and road sawing — new services. A laboratory of this complexity carries far more hydraulic, electrical and mechanical services than the building it replaced. We core drilled penetrations throughout for new plumbing and electrical, and road sawed service trenches into the slab for the new runs.
All of it was carried out inside an occupied construction site with other trades working around us — sequenced to suit FDC’s programme, with dust and slurry controlled throughout.
