The provisional handover and your walls: what should you look out for?

What does the handover mean for your walls and ceilings?

The provisional handover is about whether the home has been delivered as agreed. For walls and ceilings that means: do they match the condition set out in your purchase or building contract, your specification and your handover documents, and is there no damage that should not be there.

That condition is often described as ready for wallpaper, unless you had the walls finished as extras through the builder. That is not a legal term, and every builder interprets it slightly differently. So find out what wallpaper-ready at a new-build handover means for your builder, and keep the three finishing levels apart: wallpaper-ready is not paint-ready.

We are the finishing contractor, not an inspector. We do not carry out handover inspections and we do not assess whether your builder has met its contract. What we do is establish, at the site visit, wall by wall, what is needed before a finish can go on.

What should and should not go in the handover report?

At handover, go through each room separately, preferably with daylight falling across the wall at an angle, and have what you see written down. What is in the report is your reference point later.

The reservation matters: if the report contains no remark about things that could not be checked, and you report damage only later, your builder can dispute those points. One line on paper therefore saves an argument afterwards.

Are shrinkage cracks snagging items?

Usually not. Fine hairline cracks from drying or hardening shrinkage come with a new home and are not a defect in themselves. It is different if cracks are clearly wider than a hairline, appear in unusual places or if material is crumbling. What counts in your case is set out in your contract and depends on what an expert, such as your architect, establishes.

That fits with what a new home does. The construction moisture leaves the concrete and cement, the structure settles, and at the weak points, such as joints and the edges around windows and doors, hairline cracks appear. That makes shrinkage cracks in a new build entirely normal.

What you do is assess cracks on the signs that do matter: is the crack getting wider, does it run through on both sides of the wall, is a door sticking or is there damp nearby? Then it is not shrinkage and you have it assessed before anything goes over it.

For your finishing, a shrinkage hairline makes little difference. Renovation fleece is a fleece that bridges small shrinkage cracks, even if they only appear after the wallpaper is already up. If in doubt, the question is which cracks renovation fleece bridges and which have to be assessed first.

What do the deadlines after handover mean for your schedule?

After the provisional handover there is a period in which your builder has to repair the points that have been recorded, up to the final handover. How long that period is and what you can demand in the meantime is set out in your own purchase or building contract. If you are unsure about your rights, ask your architect or a legal adviser.

In practice that clashes with the wish to finish quickly. If you let a reported point disappear under skim coat and renovation fleece, it can no longer be established afterwards whether it was repaired, and your report loses its basis.

So read the deadlines and conditions of your own contract carefully, or ask your builder, because this differs from contract to contract.

What do you do if a wall defect only shows up during the finishing?

That happens regularly, because a bare wall looks different from a wall with a first coat. So take photos of every room before the finishing, with daylight falling across the wall at an angle. Then you have recorded what the wall was like when we began.

If our tradesperson sees something at the site visit or during the work that looks like more than an unevenness, for example loose plasterwork or a wet patch, we say so and we do not simply work over it. We discuss it with you first, even if that moves the schedule by a few days.

If the wall simply turns out not to be flat enough, that is not a defect but preparation: skim coat goes on as a base for the renovation fleece. We charge skim coat in a new build per m², and in the worked example for a complete home you can see what that adds up to.

How do we look at your walls after handover?

If you have a handover report, send the points about walls and ceilings with your request, together with the m² per room. Then we know which walls stay open for now, and the free quote you receive within 24 hours takes that into account.

At the site visit we go through each room separately, run a flat hand over the joints, tap doubtful spots and check whether the wall is dry enough.

Prices exclude VAT. For new-build homes VAT is normally 21%; the VAT rate is stated in your quote.

What we see, we turn into two lists: what we solve in the finishing, and what you would do better to raise with your builder first. We make that distinction explicit because otherwise it could cost you a report that you can no longer support.

The work after that is done by our own tradespeople: 40 wallpaper hangers, 32 plasterers and 25 painters on permanent contracts, who finish more than 600 new-build homes a year. For renovation fleece in a whole home, hung, filled and painted, we allow 3 days, plus the drying time of skim coat if that is needed first.

If you do not have the keys yet, a checklist for the period before the keys lets you arrange part of it in advance. After that the question is when you can start finishing after the key handover, and we take over the whole process when you have your new-build home finished.