Trades Overlap On Site And That Is Where Blame Lives

Building work is divided by trade, but a house is not. The defects that cause the most argument almost always sit exactly on the line between two people's responsibilities.

Every trade hands over to the next

A wall is built by one person, wired by another, plastered by a third and decorated by a fourth. Each depends on the previous handover being correct.

If the plaster is uneven, the decorator can either absorb the extra preparation or refuse the surface, and both responses create friction rather than a solution.

The work itself is rarely in dispute. What is in dispute is the standard expected at the handover, which was usually never written down.

Damage after completion is the classic argument

A finished floor is walked on by every trade that follows, and by the end of the job it carries marks nobody admits to making.

The remedy is sequence rather than accusation. Fitting vulnerable finishes late, or protecting them properly, removes the situation instead of arbitrating it.

Where protection is used, it needs to be specified as somebody's responsibility, because a roll of covering that nobody was asked to lay does not lay itself.

Services routed by one trade constrain another

Pipes and cables are installed early and buried, and their positions determine where later fixings can go.

A cabinet fixed into a hidden cable is a failure of information rather than of skill, and photographing every wall before it is closed up is the cheapest possible insurance.

Those photographs remain useful for years afterwards, long after everyone involved has forgotten what is behind the plaster.

Direct appointment shifts the coordination onto you

Hiring trades individually saves the margin a main contractor charges for coordination, and that margin is the price of somebody else owning the joins.

Managed directly, the householder becomes responsible for sequence, for handover standards and for resolving disagreements between people who did not choose to work together.

That is entirely workable on a small job and increasingly difficult on a large one, which is the real distinction rather than the size of the budget.

Write the boundaries into the scope

Stating who makes good, who protects, who removes waste and who provides power and water eliminates a surprising proportion of disputes before they can occur.

These are small items individually, and they are precisely the items that no quotation mentions and everyone assumes somebody else has priced.