In brief
The handover of a residence from a general contractor is not one day with a signature and a set of keys. It is the last of several dozen stage sign-offs that took place across two years, and in a house with a dozen or more technical systems it takes several days, because the house is checked in operation. With the keys you receive the house archive – the as-built documentation, the routes of every service, the equipment cards, the codes and accounts – and I prepare the completion notice for the building supervision office. In the first year the house settles: it gives back the last of the water from the build, goes through its first winter with the heating set on real weather, and shows hairline cracks where different materials meet. That is normal, and there is a visit after the first heating season for exactly that. Every system has its own inspection calendar; I keep it myself and I am the one who reminds you of the dates. And when something stops working, you ring the same number as during the build.
House handover from a general contractor is not a single day
The question of what happens after handover usually comes at the very end of a conversation, after the pool and the schedule. I understand why – someone with two years of building ahead of them looks at the day of the keys as the finish line. I look at it as the start of a first year in which the house still has a fair amount to do: the heating works on real frost for the first time, the timber dries in a heated interior for the first time, and the automation gets its first real data about what a day in this house looks like. During that year we see each other almost as often as on the build, only about different things.
Let me start with the handover itself, because an idea has grown around it of a single day on which everything is decided. On a build run properly, the sign-offs begin in the first month: the reinforcement is checked before the concrete is poured, the waterproofing before the backfill goes in, every service before plastering, because once it is covered, finding a leak means chasing walls. I wrote about the week when the site stands still while everything that is about to disappear under plaster gets tested in the text on why a residence takes about two years. The final handover is therefore the last in a long series. There should be no structural surprises at it – if there are, something went wrong much earlier.
What remains to be checked at the end is the finish and the technology. In a house with this many systems I spread that over several days, by subject, because in a single day nobody can properly look at several hundred square metres of walls and test a dozen systems at the same time. A day for the finish: walls and ceilings looked at in daylight and again in the evening under artificial light, because a skim coat that looks perfect at noon shows every wave under a raking lamp; floors, stone, joinery, every door leaf on its own. A day or two for the technology in operation: heating, cooling, ventilation, pool, automation – tested the way they will be used: you leave the house, you come back, night falls, we cut the internet, holiday mode comes on. A mere “it switches on” is not enough. A day for the grounds: irrigation, lighting, gates, drainage after the first proper downpour, if one can be caught.
At the table sit you, me and the site manager. On your side it is good to have someone else who reads protocols for a living – your architect or an independent inspector. I say the same thing before the contract is signed and I say it before the handover: bring someone. The handover is not a battlefield, but you are looking at the house you are about to move into, and someone at your side is looking at the list.
That list is the most important document of the day. Every item has a place, a description and a deadline – “kitchen, wall by the window, crack above the skirting, to be made good after the heating season”. You put on it everything that bothers you, including things you are not sure about – better to write down a crack that turns out to be a streak of dust than to explain after signing that it was there before. I know handovers where the crew showed impatience to shorten the looking. With me it is the other way round: every hour you spend on the handover with a torch is a few phone calls fewer in January. Small items go on the list with deadlines. Something that would make the house impossible to live in would stop the handover – but things like that come out months earlier, at the sign-offs nobody sees.
There is one more part of the handover that does not look like a handover: the walk-through. Where the main water valve is and how to shut it, where the distribution board is and which breaker cuts what, where the ventilation filters sit, how to switch the pool off, what to do when the generator starts on its own. This is knowledge worth keeping in your head rather than in a binder. At two in the morning, with water running across the floor, nobody goes looking for the binder.
What you receive with the keys
There are three things to take over.
The first is the formal completion of the build. In Poland a single-family house is reported to the building supervision office with a completion notice and a set of documents: the site manager’s declaration, the surveyor’s as-built survey, the test and measurement protocols, the energy performance certificate, the approved design with the changes made along the way marked on it. The exact set follows from the regulations and from the specific build – which rules the permit was issued under, what is in the design – and offices differ in how thoroughly they check the paperwork, so I will not give you a closed list here. I will give you the mechanism: under the usual procedure the office has two weeks to object, and its silence is consent. Formally you file the notice, because for the office you are the party; in practice I prepare the set, the site manager signs the declarations, and you receive it for signature. If you wanted to move in before all the works covered by the permit are finished, a separate occupancy permit may be needed – whether a garden still waiting for spring triggers that, the site manager advises, and in case of doubt we check it against the permit. And one practical thing: a house number can be assigned before the build is finished. The letterbox and the change of address at the banks do not have to wait for the last protocol.
The second is the house archive. The as-built documentation, meaning drawings of what was really built, with the changes; the routes of every service – where a pipe runs, where a cable runs, where the duct goes under the driveway; photographs of every installation taken before plastering; the test and measurement protocols; the cards and manuals of every piece of equipment; a list of who installed what, with telephone numbers. That list is not there for you to ring people – it is there so that it exists outside my head. And the drawings and photographs become useful at a moment you are not thinking about today: in five years someone will be hanging a picture or drilling for a shelf, and it is good to know what is inside that wall at a height of one metre.
The third is people and keys. For two years the house had several dozen people with access: crews, service engineers, suppliers. On the day of handover that circle closes. The alarm codes, the accounts in the automation, the passwords to the recorder and the apps are changed at handover, and the service accounts stay separate from yours, because the lighting engineer does not need access to the cameras. What exactly remains after a service engineer leaves, and why a service code must not be the owner’s code, I described in the text on the alarm system. And one thing that is not mine, but I remind you of it: the policy for a house under construction and the policy for a house you live in are two different policies – the change is on your side.
The first year: the house settles
The house is new, and that has physical consequences. The plasters and the screeds brought thousands of litres of water into the building. Most of it left before the finishing, during the heat-up of the screeds and the moisture measurements, but the rest comes out slowly, through the first year, and in thick walls sometimes through two. Hence the first piece of advice, a prosaic one: in the first summer keep the mechanical ventilation running, do not switch it off “because it is quiet”, and air the house whenever it is drier outside than in. Warm, damp air standing still in a closed house is exactly what you do not want in fresh walls.
The first winter does two things to the house. First, the heating works for real for the first time. The settings from commissioning are a starting point – the heating curve is set on real frost, in January, because a trial run in May knows nothing about frost. The south-facing room with the large glazing will be too warm and the north corner room too cool until someone corrects it once the house is lived in. On top of that, in the first winter the house is also heating walls that are still damp, so it uses more energy than it will in the third. It is simply water in the walls.
Second, the first heating season shows cracks. Hairline ones, in the corners of the skim coat, where the concrete slab meets the masonry, along the plasterboard, by the skirting. The timber does its own work at the same time: floorboards open up by a hair, the stairs start to creak, solid-wood fronts move a little. A material that has gone for the first time from a damp summer into a dry, heated interior shrinks – each one by a different fraction – so where two different ones meet, a line appears. A crack that has appeared and stays put is usually cosmetic. A crack that grows from week to week is a matter for the structural engineer. Spotting which is which, and bringing the engineer in when needed, is my job.
That is why first-year repairs are not done in November. A crack filled in November opens again in February next to the filling, because the house is still moving. They are done after the first heating season, in a single visit: cracks, sealant that has shrunk, door adjustment (leaves settle, especially where children hang on the handles), window hardware, the small items from a list we keep together through the winter. Over those months we collect the cosmetic things, and the things that do not work we deal with straight away.
There is a third thing in the first year – your habits. The automation was programmed for how we assumed you would live. After a few weeks of living there, the installer comes back and asks how you actually live, and the scenes that looked sensible on paper and are irritating in real life get rewritten. The same with the pool, where the chemical dosing and the probes are calibrated over the first months, and with the heating I mentioned above. Some things turn out to be a matter of cleaning: a door frame touched every day by a wet mop will eventually swell, and that is not an installation defect (hotels show it most clearly), which is why at the walk-through I also explain how to wash the floor by the doors. In my own house I coated the undersides of the frames with waterproof glue before they went in. I ran no experiment, but glue, unlike silicone, soaks into the board and seals it from below – the logic holds.
The inspection calendar – who remembers it
A house of this class has a dozen or more systems, and each has its own rhythm. To keep it manageable I split it into two lists: what the law requires and what the equipment requires.
The first list is the owner’s obligations – regardless of how the house was built. Once a year the flues: smoke, exhaust and ventilation ducts, checked by a chimney sweep with a master’s qualification; where the ventilation is mechanical or a chimney has forced draught, a person with building qualifications does it, and the heat recovery unit itself has its own service. Once a year the gas installation, if there is one. At least once every five years the electrical and lightning protection installations. Some equipment with refrigerant in it – the heat pump, the air conditioning, the dehumidifier of the pool hall – has on top of that a statutory duty of periodic leak checks by a certified service, with its own register; it depends on the type and quantity of refrigerant in the circuit, so I check the duty for each unit separately. A single consolidated log of all inspections, the kind apartment blocks and office buildings must keep, is not required of a single-family house in Poland; the protocols still have to be kept. I keep such a log anyway, because with a dozen systems memory is not enough.
The second list is what the equipment itself requires, and that is where most of the work is. Before the heating season, the heat pump and the plant room, whatever stands in it. Heat recovery: filters replaced several times a year (a dirty filter means more resistance, louder running and, in winter, the risk of an iced exchanger), the exchanger cleaned once a year, the ducts whenever an inspection shows they need it. Air conditioning before summer, with the evaporator cleaned and disinfected, because that is the air you breathe. An enamelled steel hot water cylinder has an anode inside that sacrifices itself instead of the tank – unless it is a titanium one, it has to be checked and replaced, otherwise after a few years the tank rusts from the inside until it stops being tight; a stainless steel cylinder does without. The water softener eats salt and somebody has to top it up. Well water has its own tests: the first before you move in, then periodically. The pool has its own rhythm: the water has a weekly one even with automation, and the filtration and the dehumidifier have an annual service – I wrote about it in the text on the climate of an indoor pool. A car lift is a lift under the technical inspection authority, with periodic examinations and a licensed maintenance engineer. Gates and their drives once a year, preferably before winter.
Then the seasons. Before winter: gutters and drainage, the irrigation blown out with compressed air – water in a pipe freezes regardless of what the system cost – the robotic mower into the garage, the generator tested under load. A generator that has not been started for a year will not start on the day of the outage either. In spring the other way round: the garden started up, the air conditioning serviced, a look at the roof after winter. That last one the law does not require of a single-family house; I do it because a tile loosened over the winter is easier to fix in May than in November, when there are wet leaves on the roof.
How it works with me: for every house I keep a calendar of these dates, and I am the one who reminds you that an inspection is coming up. I arrange the service, usually with the people who installed the equipment, because they know it better than anyone. The protocol from every inspection goes into the house archive – also because the insurer asks about them. The legal duty to have the inspections done stays with you as the owner; in practice I carry it for you: I remind you, book the service and file the protocol.
When something does not work – one number
On the build nobody rings you but me, and you ring nobody but me. I wrote about why that one number changes so much in the text on living alongside the build. After handover the rule stays. What changes is what happens on the other side of that call, and here I distinguish three kinds of report.
The first: water, gas, electricity. First the valve or the breaker – the one I showed you at the handover – and then a call to me, straight away; with water, gas and electricity there are no office hours. The second: something does not work, but the house is liveable – one zone is not heating, the gate does not close fully, the app cannot see the cameras. You report it and I arrange the service, usually within a few days, because I know who installed it, which model it is and where the drawing is; if a part has to be ordered from abroad, I tell you straight away how long that will take and find a stopgap for the meantime. The third: first-year cosmetics – a crack, a shrunken grout line, a door leaf that has started to catch. That goes on the list and waits for the visit after the season, unless it gets in the way of living. Every report has its place and its time – you do not have to judge for yourself whether it is serious yet.
I do not turn up with a spanner. Someone who knows the equipment turns up, and my role is to make sure you do not need to know who that should be. A decision is tied to this that is made long before handover, at the ordering stage. I tell clients about the scenario I fear most myself: the twentieth of December, a phone call, the heat pump has stopped. The person who services a heat pump is sometimes its installer and sometimes the manufacturer’s partner – do not assume a service network stands behind it the way one stands behind a gas boiler – so the questions “what if it breaks, who comes, are there parts for it, what if that firm does not exist in five years” I ask before the unit is ordered. As long as the pump runs, the differences between manufacturers are small. On the twentieth of December they are enormous.
And the people who come to the house after handover: cleaning, the garden, the service engineers. A service engineer gets access for the duration of the visit, with a code of his own, and after he leaves it is known what remains and what does not. Every access has an owner and an end date, and after a visit it is known who was in the house and at what.
What I do not promise – and when this model is not worth it
I do not promise that nothing will break. Anodes, filters, probes, seals and pump bearings wear out, and that is what the inspection is for – so that the replacement is planned rather than an emergency. A house in which nothing needs attention for a year I do not know. I know houses in which somebody keeps that attention.
I do not run the house day to day. Salt in the softener, the filter in the kitchen, the water in the pool, leaves in the gutter – that is the rhythm of the house, and someone from the household or a service firm looks after it. If you want someone to manage the whole estate and its people, that is a separate role; I can help you fill it, but I do not hold it myself. This is also where the model stops paying off: if you already have your own estate manager and your own service firms, my inspection calendar duplicates his. In that case I hand him the house archive, sit down with him for one conversation about the systems, and remain on the number for building matters. That happens too.
I will not tell you from an article what to replace how often in your house. That follows from the equipment, from the water, from how many people live in the house and how. That calendar is made at handover, for a specific house. And I am not a lawyer – the formal duties of an owner after completion are for the site manager to explain and, if you want to be certain, for your lawyer.
After the first year we see each other less. The house has stopped moving, the inspections run on their own track, and I get in touch before a season rather than every few weeks. You ring the same number as before.
What to ask a builder about the time after handover – anyone, me included
Ask these questions of anyone you talk to about a build, me included:
- What does the handover look like: one day with a protocol, or several days in stages – and are the systems checked in operation, the way they will be used, or merely switched on?
- What do I receive with the keys: as-built documentation, the routes of the services, photographs of the installations from before plastering, equipment cards, a list of who installed what?
- What happens to the codes, accounts and access of the people from the build on the day of handover?
- Who keeps the inspection calendar after handover and who reminds whom of the dates – you or I?
- Whom do I ring when something stops working on a Saturday evening – and is it the same number as during the build?
Three answers should make you wary. “It is all in the manuals” means the inspection calendar is yours. “Please call the installer” means that after handover you have a dozen contractors instead of one. And a handover “in one day, like everywhere” in a house with a pool, a car lift and automation means nobody checked those systems in operation.
Questions about working with me – from the first conversation to what happens after handover – are answered in the Questions section.
Frequently asked questions
What does a house handover from a general contractor look like?
With me, several days, by subject: the finish in daylight and evening light, the technology in operation the way it will be used, the grounds. At the table: you, me, the site manager and – I recommend it – someone who reads protocols for a living. The handover produces a list with deadlines, on which you put everything that bothers you, even if it later turns out to be nothing. The structure is not a subject of the final handover, because it was signed off stage by stage over two years.
What inspections await me in the first year in a new house?
Two lists. What the law requires of the owner: once a year the flues and the gas installation, at least once every five years the electrical installation, and for some equipment with refrigerant a periodic leak check. And what the equipment requires: the heat pump before winter, the air conditioning before summer, the heat recovery filters several times a year, the cylinder anode, salt in the softener, the pool service, the gates, winterising the garden. I keep the calendar of those dates, and I am the one who reminds you.
Are cracks in the walls in the first year a cause for concern?
Usually not. Hairline cracks in the corners and where different materials meet appear in the first heating season, when the house is giving back the last of the water from the build and every material shrinks by a different fraction. A crack that has appeared and stays put is usually cosmetic, and it is made good after the season, in a single visit. A crack that grows from week to week is a matter for the structural engineer – spotting which is which is my job.
Can I still ring the builder after handover?
Yes, on the same number. Water, gas, electricity – straight away, after shutting the valve or the breaker. Something does not work but the house is liveable – you report it, and I arrange the service with the people who installed it. First-year cosmetics go on a shared list and wait for the visit after the season. After the first year the reminders are rarer, and the number stays.
If you want to see what that first year would look like with your house – you are welcome. Let’s talk about your project.