Clearing snags dwelling by dwelling without losing the winter to it
On a new building, handover is an event: one day, one project manager, one list. On an occupied refurbishment, there are as many handovers as dwellings, spread over weeks, and each one produces three lines of rework that somebody has to attach to the right trade.
This article is part of the guide
Works in occupied buildingsOne photo, one snag
The written description of a snag is always arguable: "average paint finish" means nothing to the painter who comes back in three weeks. The photo shows the wall, the angle and the light. That is why a snag should be a photo, taken in the room, to which you add a sentence and a trade.
One practical consequence: take the photo before writing, not the other way round. The inspection goes room by room, camera in hand, and the text is completed in the evening if needed. An inspection that starts with writing produces short, vague lists, because nobody writes twenty lines standing in a hallway.
Every snag belongs to a trade
A snag list without trades is a list nobody can act on. The site manager will have to re-read it line by line to split it up, and they will do so three weeks later, from memory, on photos they did not take.
So the trade is assigned at the moment of the photo, while the wall is still in front of you. There is nothing to type: the site's trades are the ones in the schedule, you pick from the list. The trade label is also copied into the snag, so that a trade renamed or removed from the schedule later does not make the snag unreadable.
Compliant, snagged, not done, or not checked
Checking an item is not a matter of ticking or not ticking. There are four states, and the fourth matters most: "not yet checked". An empty box printed as compliant is an involuntary lie, and it is the one that turns against the contractor the day the tenant reports the defect.
So the clearing visit picks up the items from the entry condition report, the ones retained in the programme, and each gets its state: compliant, snagged, not done, or nothing. A document that prints "not checked" is an honest document, and it costs less than a compliant contradicted three months later.
Handing the list to the right person
Once the visit is done, three people want three different things. The tenant wants a signed document saying what is left to do in their home. The subcontractor wants the list of THEIR snags, across the whole building, to plan a day of rework. The client wants the count: how many dwellings handed over, how many with snags, how many cleared.
If the data is entered once, those three outputs are three readings of the same list, not three re-entries. That is the only way to hold two hundred dwellings: the site manager copies nothing, they filter.
Sign the same day, in the tenant's home
The clearing report carries the dwelling's identification, the summary, the rooms with the photo of each snag, the snag table, the checked items and two signatures: the tenant's and the site manager's. It is signed on the tablet, before leaving.
A report signed later loses its point: the tenant no longer remembers what they saw, and the contractor ends up defending a list drawn up without a witness. Two more minutes on the landing are worth one adversarial meeting avoided.
Clearing snags dwelling by dwelling comes down to three moves: photograph instead of describing, assign the trade on the spot, and get the signature before leaving. The rest, filtering by trade, counting cleared dwellings, producing the report, follows with no re-entry. FloorScan's site tracking module is built on that chain, from the daily schedule to the signed report.