Handover Day: What to Inspect, What to Withhold, and What a Snag List Should Actually Say

AlcorOne Solutions is a Hyderabad-based interior execution studio specialising in residential and commercial fit-outs across Gachibowli, Kondapur, Kokapet, and the Financial District. All work is manufactured in-house and assembled on site — no subcontracting, no surprise substitutions mid-project.

What You Are Actually Deciding

There are only three answers available to you at the end of a walkthrough, and it helps enormously to know that before you start.

Accept. The work is complete and usable, the defects that remain are minor and cosmetic, and you are willing to take possession while those items are closed out with an agreed amount held back.

Accept with conditions. The work is usable but a defined list of items must be closed before a specified payment is released. This is the normal outcome of a competent handover, and it is not a failure — it is what handover is for.

Do not accept. Something is incomplete or defective in a way that means the space cannot be used for its purpose, or that means later work will have to be undone to fix it. You are not obliged to accept a fit-out because a date has arrived.

The mistake owners make is treating handover as a binary — sign or fight. The middle option is the correct one in almost every project, and getting it right depends entirely on how well the snag list is written.

Running the Day Itself

Book the walkthrough in daylight and set aside enough time that nobody is rushing. Defects in finishes are lighting-dependent; a room inspected at night under warm cove lighting will look flawless and hand you a wall of visible patches the following morning.

Have the person who is empowered to agree the list present. If the site supervisor cannot commit the contractor to a closure date, the list you write together is a wish. On our projects that person is Pradeep Kumar Vasadi, who has owned the site from survey through supervision — deliberately the same person, so nothing is explained twice.

Walk the flat room by room in one direction and finish each room before moving on. Do not walk around noticing things. Noticing produces a list of complaints; systematic walking produces a list of items.

Bring the drawings. The electrical layout, the BOQ, and any approved revisions. A large share of handover disagreements are not about defects at all — they are about whether something was ever in scope. The BOQ answers that in ten seconds and prevents an hour of argument.

Write the list on the spot and both parties keep a copy the same day. A snag list circulated three days later has already lost the shared context in which it was agreed.

What a Useful Snag Entry Looks Like

This is the single highest-leverage thing in this article. Most snag lists fail not because the contractor ignored them but because the entries were not closable.

A vague entry: "Kitchen not finished."

Nobody can act on that. The contractor does not know what to send whom to fix. You cannot verify closure, because there is no stated end state. And at the moment of dispute, both sides genuinely believe they are right.

A closable entry has four parts:

• Location, precisely. Not "kitchen" but "kitchen, base unit to the left of the sink, second drawer from the top."
• The defect, observed. Not "bad quality" but "drawer front sits proud of the adjacent front along its right edge and fouls the neighbouring shutter on closing."
• The required remedy. Not "fix it" but "adjust or replace channel and realign front flush with the adjacent line."
• Who closes it and by when. A named trade and an agreed date, so that a missed date is a fact rather than an impression.

Photograph every entry, and photograph it in a way that identifies the location — one wide shot showing where in the room you are, one close shot showing the defect. A close-up of a scratch with no context is unusable in six weeks when everyone has forgotten which wall it was.

Number every entry and never renumber. Closure is tracked against the number. A list that gets re-typed and renumbered halfway through becomes impossible to reconcile.

Which Defects Justify Withholding — and Which Do Not

Withholding payment is a legitimate instrument. Using it indiscriminately destroys the working relationship you still need in order to get the snags closed, so it is worth being clear about which side of the line an item falls on.

Defects that reasonably justify holding a meaningful amount:

• Anything that makes a space unusable for its function — a kitchen where the sink is not connected, a bathroom vanity that cannot be used, a bedroom wardrobe that cannot be closed.
• Wrong material where the specification mattered. Commercial MR board found in a wet zone that was quoted as IS 710 BWP is not a snag; it is a substitution, and it is a rebuild of that unit.
• Safety and compliance items — an electrical point that trips, an earthing issue, a loose overhead unit, glass without the specified treatment.
• Anything that will require later work to be undone if it is not fixed now. A concealed defect behind a closing layer is always more expensive tomorrow.
• Missing scope. A BOQ line item that simply was not built.

Defects that belong on the list but do not justify holding a large sum:

• Touch-up level finish issues — minor scuffs, small dents from installation, paint patching at junctions.
• Alignment adjustments to hinges and channels that are a screwdriver job.
• Silicone lines that need redoing.
• Cleaning. A site that has not been deep-cleaned is annoying but is not a defect in the work.

The practical version of the rule: hold against the cost of getting it fixed by someone else if the contractor never returns, plus enough margin that returning is the cheaper option for them. Holding an amount wildly out of proportion to the outstanding items gives the contractor no rational path back to your site and generally guarantees the snags stay open.

Retention, Explained Without the Jargon

Retention is an agreed portion of the contract value that stays unpaid for a defined period after handover, and is released when that period ends with the defect list closed.

It exists because of a timing problem. Some defects only reveal themselves under use. Board movement at a joint, a door that begins to bind as the season changes, a drawer that develops a sag under real loading, a silicone line that lifts — none of these are visible on handover day. If the entire contract value is paid on handover day, the only thing bringing the contractor back is goodwill, and goodwill is not a mechanism.

What matters about retention is not the number, it is that four things are agreed in writing at signing, not at handover:

• The amount held.
• The length of the period it is held for.
• The specific condition that releases it.
• Who confirms that condition is met, and what happens if the two sides disagree.

Retention negotiated after a dispute has begun is not retention. It is a hostage, and hostage situations do not end with someone coming back to adjust your wardrobe hinges.

Defect Liability After Handover

The period after handover during which the contractor returns to fix defects is a commercial term in your contract. It varies between firms, it varies by item, and manufacturer warranties on hardware, appliances and laminates are separate from it and run on their own terms.

Two things to get straight before you sign, because both are routinely left ambiguous:

What counts as a defect versus wear or misuse. A hinge that fails on its own is a defect. A hinge that fails because a shutter was loaded far beyond what it was designed for is not. Get the boundary described in the contract in ordinary language rather than discovering the two sides read it differently later.

What voids it. Third-party modification is the common one. If another carpenter cuts into a unit to run a cable, the original contractor will not usually stand behind that unit afterwards, and that is not unreasonable.

Do not accept a verbal assurance about a period. Whatever is agreed, it should appear in the contract in writing with its start date defined — usually the handover date, which is another reason to record that date formally.

What You Should Walk Away Holding

Documents are easiest to collect on the day everyone is still standing in the flat and hardest to collect a month later when the team is on another site. Ask for all of it at handover.

• The as-built electrical layout. Where the conduits actually run, marked with any on-site deviations from the original drawing. This is the document that prevents someone drilling into a live line later.
• Plumbing routes for concealed lines, for the same reason.
• Material records. Board grades by location, laminate and finish codes, hardware makes and models. Laminate codes in particular matter — matching a discontinued finish two years later without the code is close to impossible.
• Warranty and guarantee papers for hardware, appliances, glass and any proprietary systems, in the name of the owner rather than the contractor wherever the manufacturer allows it.
• Invoices for owner-supplied or pass-through items — appliances especially, since the manufacturer will want proof of purchase, not a line in a fit-out bill.
• The signed snag list with numbers, dates and named owners.
• Care instructions for the specific finishes used. PU, veneer, acrylic and laminate all fail differently when cleaned wrongly.

Take your own photographs of every room on handover day before you move furniture in. Damage caused during your own shifting is a common and entirely avoidable source of argument, and a timestamped set of clean-room photographs settles it in a minute.

Standards, regulatory registries, and manufacturer references that back the material grades, pricing framework, and compliance points in this guide:

• BIS IS 710 — Marine (BWP) grade plywood
• Telangana RERA — project registry