Labour Camp Guides
Labour Camp Furniture Checklist for Contractors
| Item | Quantity per room | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steel bunk beds | 4 | 80 x 190 cm or 90 x 190 cm | |
| Mattresses | 8 | Matched to bed size | FR cover |
| Pillows and bedding sets | 8 | 1 per bed space | |
| Locker compartments | 8 | 1 lockable compartment per resident | |
| Steel shoe rack | 1 | At room or corridor entrance | |
| Waste bin | 1 to 2 | Lidded | wipe-clean |
| Mess hall seats | 8 shared | Sized to largest single sitting |
Room-by-room furniture checklist
Work room type by room type rather than as a single site total. A camp has four distinct furniture zones and each has a different failure mode if you get it wrong.
Sleeping rooms need bunk beds, mattresses, bedding, one lockable compartment per resident, a shoe rack at the entrance and waste bins. Mess halls need tables and benches sized to your largest sitting, plus serving counters and tray-return stations. Kitchens need stainless steel prep tables, shelving and serving lines fabricated to the kitchen drawings. Common and recreation areas need seating and storage, which is the zone most often left out of the budget entirely.
Add the zones people forget: a laundry area with folding surfaces, a prayer room, a first aid or sick room with at least one single bed, and a small office or supervisor room. None are large line items, but each becomes an urgent problem in the week before occupancy.
Quantities per room and per worker
Start from room drawings, not from headcount. Divide the total workforce by workers per room to get a room count, then multiply per-room quantities from the table above. This catches the rounding problem: 500 workers at eight per room is 62.5 rooms, and that half room is a real room that still needs four bunk beds.
Size mess-hall seating to your largest single sitting, not to total headcount. A camp of 500 running two dining sittings needs roughly 250 to 300 covers. Running three sittings brings that down further but tightens your kitchen service window, so confirm the shift pattern with the site manager before you order tables.
Add a buffer of two to five percent on beds, mattresses and locker compartments for damage, headcount growth and the units that get written off during installation. Ordering the buffer with the main order costs a fraction of ordering it separately six months later.
Specification points to confirm
Confirm these points in writing before you sign anything. Bed size and mattress size stated separately and matched. Tubing wall thickness on bed frames, in the 1.2 to 1.6 mm range. Guard rail height on upper bunks, approximately 28 to 32 cm. Ladder type and position. Locker steel gauge and whether doors are perforated. Lock type and who supplies padlocks. Mattress core, density, thickness and fire-retardant cover, stated as a specification rather than a claim. Powder coat type, specifically whether it is electrostatic.
Then confirm the commercial points that matter later. Whether the manufacturer keeps your specification on file for identical top-up orders. Whether delivery includes installation and packaging removal. What the lead time is from purchase order to installed, not from purchase order to dispatched.
If any of these come back vague, that is your answer about what will arrive on site.
Delivery and installation planning
Sequence the delivery to match the building, not the invoice. Beds and mattresses go in last in each room, after painting, electrical second fix and cleaning, because they are the items most likely to be damaged or soiled by trades still working.
Confirm site access before the trucks are booked: gate dimensions, road surface for the final approach, whether there is a lift or whether everything goes up stairs, and which floors are actually handed over. A 40-foot trailer arriving at a site with no turning circle is a lost day for everyone.
Agree packaging removal in writing. Five hundred beds generate a genuinely large volume of cardboard and shrink wrap, and if it is not in the contract it becomes your problem on the day. Also agree a snagging window, typically seven days, for reporting transit damage.
Timeline: ordering before occupancy
Work backwards from the occupancy date. For a camp of a few hundred beds, a comfortable programme is eight to ten weeks from purchase order to fully installed, assuming a locally manufactured order.
A realistic sequence: finalise room drawings and quantities in week one, obtain and compare line-itemed quotes in week two, approve samples and issue the purchase order in week three, allow four to six weeks for manufacturing, then one to two weeks for phased delivery and installation. Leave a final week for snagging before workers arrive.
Importing compresses none of this and adds shipping and customs risk on top, which is why contractors working to fixed occupancy dates increasingly buy from UAE factories. Send us your headcount, room drawings and target occupancy date and we will confirm a delivery programme alongside the quote.
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