Signing a Children's Home: How Little to Sign, and Which Doors

A useful way to sort the doors is to ask what the sign is for. There are only three honest answers:

• It tells somebody who does not live here where something is. That is the staff office, the laundry, the meter cupboard, the store — the doors a relief worker, a visiting professional or a contractor needs to find without asking.
• It is a statutory or operational notice that has to be there. Fire exit routes, fire action notices, the assembly point, the electrical intake, first aid. These are a different purchase from anything we make and they usually come from a different supplier under their own regime; keep them on a separate schedule and do not let them get designed to match the house.
• It belongs to the young person whose door it is. That is a different thing again, and it is not really a sign schedule item at all.

In a typical two-to-six bed house, this is close to the whole list:

• Staff office, and the sleep-in room where there is one.
• Medication storage and records storage, named as what the room or cupboard is rather than what is held in it.
• Laundry, utility and the cleaning store.
• Meter cupboard, electrical intake, boiler and the stopcock, which is the one everybody wants at 2am and nobody has labelled.
• Bin store, external store and the garden gate if the house has a side access.
• A single sign at the front door with the house's name or number, matching the street and saying nothing about what the building is used for.

• If the answer is nothing on the door, you order nothing, and the only thing to get right is that the schedule does not quietly include six bedroom signs because the template had them.
• If the answer is the young person chooses, order a holder with a changeable insert and fix it at a height they can reach and change themselves. The specification is the frame and the fixing; what goes in it is theirs and may change next month.
• If the answer is a plain room number for the handover sheet and the fire list, order a small permanent numeral in the same finish as the service doors, and keep it consistent across every house you run so the paperwork matches the building.
• If different houses in your estate have reached different answers, that is fine, but write each one down. A house whose practice lives only in the current manager's head produces a reorder nobody can fulfil in two years.

• The fixing. Adhesive on a painted fire door and a mechanical fixing into a frame behave completely differently when a sign gets caught; decide per door type, not per building, and record which you used.
• The replacement route. A single sign will come off a wall, and what you want then is one replacement that matches the other nine exactly, not a new set. Signs made to order can be matched years later from the original specification, which is an argument for writing the specification down rather than for any particular product.

• The door list for one house: every door you intend to sign, with its wording. Get one house right and the rest of the estate is a copy with the numbers changed.
• Whether bedroom doors are in scope at all, and if so whether you are ordering frames or finished signs.
• One finish for the whole estate, or a finish per house. The first makes reorders trivial; the second makes every reorder a conversation.
• The fixing method for each door type in your housing stock.
• Who approves the wording, centrally or per home.
• How many houses are in scope now, because a schedule written once and applied to twelve houses is a different piece of work — and a different price — from twelve separate orders.