Snagging list: catching defects while somebody else still has to fix them

A snagging list is the record of defects and unfinished items identified when work is inspected before handover — doors that catch, paint runs, missing seals, sockets that do not work, tiles laid short. It is produced by the client, their surveyor or the contractor’s own supervisor, and it exists because the moment of practical completion is the last point at which the incentive to fix things is on someone else.

That timing is the whole point. Before handover, the outstanding items are the contractor’s obligation and there is retention money against them. Afterwards the same items become a defects-liability negotiation, and the ones nobody wrote down become yours.

How to produce a snagging list properly

1. Inspect room by room in a fixed order, and finish a room before moving on. Wandering produces duplicates and gaps.
2. Record each item with its exact location, what is wrong and a photograph. "Scratch on glass" is not findable; "living room, left window, lower pane, scratch 100mm" is.
3. Number every item and never reuse a number, even after an item is closed.
4. Separate defects from incomplete work and from items outside the contract — they are resolved by different routes.
5. Test rather than look: open every window and door, run every tap, switch every socket, flush everything, check the heating in every room.
6. Issue the list formally with a date and, if the contract sets one, the response period.
7. Re-inspect against the list and close items individually, with evidence. Do not close a room in bulk.

Photographs and location do the work

A snagging list fails on ambiguity more than on omission. If the contractor cannot find the item from the description, it comes back unfixed and the exchange costs both sides a week. A photograph attached to the entry, plus a room name and a position within the room, converts a disputed item into a work instruction. It also settles the argument that matters later: whether the defect was present at handover.

A defect is not the same as a snag caused by later use or by normal drying and settlement. New buildings crack slightly as they dry, and disputes over hairline cracking are routine. Photographing the state at handover is the only thing that separates the two categories afterwards.

On building services, many of these items surface during commissioning. A commissioning checklist records the static and dynamic checks for each system, with measured values, so the failures that end up here are evidence-based rather than anecdotal.

Tracking items to closure

The list is a work queue, not a document — each item has a status, an owner and a date, and the point of the exercise is getting every one to closed with evidence. A board with a column per status and a card per item is the natural shape: Ettex Board tracks the items to closure with the photographs attached, Ettex Forms collects them on site as they are found rather than from notes typed up afterwards, and Ettex Records keeps the issued list, the re-inspection and the sign-off as the file you can produce if the retention is questioned — the same file the handover document should point at.

Directly: none of this is a substitute for a professional pre-completion inspection where the value at stake justifies one, and the rights you have at handover come from your contract and your jurisdiction, not from the list. What the list does is make sure that whatever those rights are, you can exercise them on a specific item with a date and a photograph.

On commercial property the same idea appears twice under different names, at different ends of the term. Snags are recorded at handover; dilapidations are the landlord’s claim at the end of the lease — and both are argued from photographs taken on a specific day.