A residential developer in south-east London asked us to clear the surface items on a scheme of apartment blocks and town houses in the run-up to handover. The work ran to twenty-six site visits across about five weeks, moving block by block and plot by plot.
What pre-handover surface snagging actually involves
This is the part of a development that nobody budgets properly. The building is finished, the inspections are booked, and what stands between the site team and a clean handover is a few hundred small defects on finished surfaces. On this scheme the work broke down as:
- Interior doors, windows and frames across three blocks and a terrace of town houses, filled, rubbed down and painted to match the existing finish
- Exterior doors and frames on the town houses, taken as a sweep: every door and frame filled first, then sanded, then finished one by one on the way back
- GRP repairs in bathrooms where shower trays and panels had been chipped during fit-out
- A marble vanity top repaired in place in one apartment
- Scratched glass polished out on apartment entrance doors, including one door where the glass had heavy scratching across the pane
Why we work a block as a sweep, not door by door
On the exterior doors our technician filled every door and frame on the plot first, then went back through sanding, then finished each one in turn. It reads as a small decision and it is not. Filler needs time before it is worked, so doing one door start-to-finish means standing around waiting for each one. Filling the whole plot first turns dead time into work time and takes days off the visit count on a scheme this size.
The things that make a live handover different
Three things happened on this job that will happen on yours.
We got pulled off mid-visit. On one day our technician was taken off the town houses at lunchtime because directors were walking the site for inspections, and was redirected to aftercare items in two apartments in an earlier block. That is normal on a live development, and it is why we price surface snagging by the day on site rather than by the item.
Earlier blocks came back. While we were snagging the later blocks, aftercare items were still landing from blocks handed over months before. A developer who treats snagging as a one-off event at handover will always be surprised by this; it runs on for as long as the scheme does.
One item was an emergency. We were sent to another block for an urgent repair before continuing. Having a repair team already on site means that happens the same day instead of becoming next week’s problem.
What gets repaired instead of replaced
Every item on this list was a finished, installed component that the alternative would have had replaced. A chipped shower tray means a strip-out of a finished bathroom. A scratched marble vanity top means a new top templated and fitted. A scratched entrance-door pane means a glazier and a new unit. Repairing in place avoids all of it, and avoids the second round of damage that comes with taking finished rooms apart.
The detail on each of those is on GRP bath and shower repair, marble repair and glass polishing.
Where repair is the wrong answer
We will say no to some items. Cracks that run through the body of a stone top, delaminated board, and damage that moves when you press it are replacement jobs, not repairs. Telling a site manager that on the first visit is more use than finding out at the inspection.
If you have a scheme coming to handover
We work with developers, main contractors and site teams across London, Essex and Kent. Send through a snag list with photographs and we will tell you what is repairable before we come to site. See new build snagging surface repairs and construction surface repairs.
Client and scheme withheld. Details are taken from our own site reports; the development is not identified.
