The truth is, most site problems do not start with bad concrete or a missing drawing. They start with a programme that nobody on site could read. A Gantt chart is the picture of your whole project in time, and…
You have seen it on every building site. The thick vertical pipe running up the corridor wall, the grey fittings sticking out of a bathroom slab, the manhole cover near the gate. Together, these form the soil and waste system,…
Walk onto any building site in Kenya and you will hear “screed” and “concrete floor” used as if they mean the same thing. They do not, and mixing them up leads to cracked tiles, hollow sounding floors and expensive rework.…
A contractor tells you at 4pm that a wall must be broken out and rebuilt before tomorrow. The drawings do not cover it. The BOQ has no rate for it. Nobody can say how long it will take. This is…
Every finish in a completed building, from the tile in the kitchen to the paint on the ceiling, was decided long before anyone mixed mortar. That decision lives in one document: the schedule of finishes. A schedule of finishes is…
You open a set of drawings on site, and within ten seconds you hit a wall of short codes: FFL, DPC, BRC, c/c, NTS, T12-200. The designer knew exactly what each one meant. The question is whether everyone on your…
A snag list is a written record of every defect, omission or unfinished item found in a building before it is handed over to the client. It is the document that decides whether a project is truly complete or only…
A plumbing layout drawing tells you where every pipe, fitting, valve and fixture goes before a single trench is dug or a wall is plastered. If you can read it, you can set out the work correctly, order the right…
Cracked tiles are one of the most expensive finishing defects on a Kenyan site, because they usually show up weeks after the client has moved in. By then the mason has left, the contractor has been paid, and nobody wants…
Brickwork looks simple on a drawing. On a BOQ it is one of the easiest places to lose money, because one small error in wall area or thickness multiplies across hundreds of square metres. In simple terms, brickwork and blockwork…
