How to write a snag list a trade can act on

A snag gets fixed when the person reading it can find the spot, see what is wrong and know what finished looks like, without ringing you. Every rule below is a way of getting those three things into one line.

Most snag lists fail on the second visit, not the first. The walk goes fine. Then the decorator reads "paint poor, hall" two weeks later, repaints the wrong wall, and the item comes back open at re-inspection with a note that just says "still poor". The sentence never said which wall, or what finished meant.

Agree the location format before anyone walks

Two people snagging the same building will describe the same room three ways: "bed 2", "back bedroom", "room 1.04". All three are correct and the trade reading the list has to translate.

Settle it before the walk. Use the room names or numbers from the drawings, and add a wall or a fixed reference inside the room: "opposite the window", "left of the door as you enter", "wall behind the WC". The test is whether somebody who has never been in the building could stand in the right place with the list in one hand.

On a multi-unit job, the plot or unit number goes first, every time. "Plot 17, en suite, wall behind WC" sorts properly, and a list sorted by plot is the one site managers actually use.

One defect, one location, one trade

The fastest way to make a snag list unworkable is to let items grow.

"Kitchen: various issues with doors and worktop, sealant missing, check sockets" is four items from three trades. The joiner fixes the doors and leaves it open because the sealant is not theirs. The electrician never sees it because it is filed under joinery. Three weeks later it is still open and nobody can say what is left.

Split it on the walk, while you are standing there:

Splitting takes seconds on site and a week of email once you have left.

Put the fix in the same sentence as the flaw

A flaw is an opinion until it has a remedy attached. "Paint poor" invites a debate about what poor means. "Roller marks and patchy coverage over about 2 square metres; sand and re-coat the full wall" tells the decorator what to do and tells you what to check next time.

The pattern that holds up is three parts:

1. Where, precisely.
2. What is wrong, measured where you can measure it.
3. What finished looks like.

Not every snag needs a long sentence. "Hall, smoke alarm cover missing. Fit cover" has all three parts in seven words.

Re-coating the full wall, rather than patching, is the kind of detail worth stating. A patch on a painted wall usually shows, and if you want the whole wall done, the snag is where you say so.

Five words that leave the fix undecided

These five words show up on almost every snag list and almost every one of them hides a decision the writer did not make.

"Make good" is the hardest to give up because it is so common on UK sites. It is fine as a verb inside a sentence that says what good means. "Make good plaster around the new socket and repaint the wall" works. "Make good" on its own leaves the trade to decide what you meant.

Measure what you can, and put a number in

"Gap at the skirting" is a judgement. "4mm gap between the skirting and the floor along the full length of the wall under the window" is a fact somebody can check with a tape.

Where the contract or the specification sets a tolerance, refer to it rather than to your own eye. Where it does not, record the measurement anyway. A number written on the day is still useful even if nobody agrees yet on what the limit is.

Pair every item with one photo, taken in the same moment

The photo is what lets a trade find the spot without you. Take it close enough to show the defect, with something of known size in the frame, and take a wider one from the doorway if the room is large or the defect is small.

Write the note at the same moment as the photo, not at the end of the floor. A dozen photos of skirting with the notes written afterwards is a matching exercise you will get wrong at least once, and the item it goes wrong on will be the one that gets disputed.

The date on the photo matters as much as the content. Most snag arguments are about when a defect appeared. A dated frame from the walk answers that before anyone asks.

Keep the numbering permanent

Number each item as you raise it and never renumber. When the list is split into per-trade schedules, the decorator's copy reads 4, 11, 23 with the gaps left in. Everyone, the contractor, the client and you on re-inspection, then refers to the same item by the same number.

Renumbering to remove closed items or to sort by severity feels tidy. It also breaks every email, every schedule and every photo caption that pointed at the old numbers.

Leave design questions off the list

Some things you will find on the walk are not snags. A socket behind where the fridge will go, a radiator that fouls the door swing, a downpipe that empties onto a path. Nothing has been built badly. The design is wrong, or the drawings disagree with each other.

Those go to the design team the same day, on their own. Left on the snag list, they sit open forever, because no trade can close them.

The list is finished when you leave the building

Sitewise runs on iPhone and iPad and is built for exactly this part of the job: a photo for each snag, a typed or dictated note attached to it (voice notes transcribe on the phone, which helps when one hand is holding a torch), a sketched arrow when the defect is hard to pick out, and a time stamp on every capture, plus a GPS pin when location is on. On a Pro iPhone or Pro iPad with a LiDAR scanner, two taps in the camera measure a gap or a run and print the dimension on the photo. It works without signal and syncs later, and the walk exports as a PDF or DOCX. It does not assign items to subcontractors, track their status or collect sign-off, and it does not run on Android or in a browser.

For the columns and a filled example, see the snag list template. If the list is going to someone in North America, what a punch list is covers the same document under its other name.