Two years later somebody asks you for the file. There is a file.
A lender, a solicitor, an insurer or a buyer. They want the building control certificate, the warranty, the electrical certificate, the air test, the drawings the house was actually built to. Every one of those arrived at some point during your build, from somebody who is no longer answering their phone. This is where each of them went on the day it arrived.
The pack on the build you can look round, open at Completion.
The shelves are named before you have anything to put on them
Open Completion on day one and it is already laid out: eleven slots with names on them. The building control certificate. The warranty final certificate. The unvented hot-water certification. The air-permeability test result. The as-built energy assessment. The VAT reclaim.
Eleven shelves, named in advance, most of them still empty.
An empty shelf is the useful half. It is the difference between knowing you are missing the ventilation commissioning record while the installer is still on site, and finding out eighteen months later when a buyer’s solicitor asks for it and the firm has changed hands.
Nothing here scores you for the empties. There is no percentage complete, no chasing and no red. A shelf either has something on it or it does not, and which of those matters is your call, not ours.
You file it where you already are
Nothing has to be moved into the pack at the end, because nothing was ever anywhere else. A certificate attached to a package, a photograph taken on a day, a signed order, a survey — it is filed once and it is the same file either way, whether you dropped it into the section or added it from the record you were working in at the time.
It sorts itself into twelve sections in the order a build happens:
- The land
- Legal
- The ground
- Design
- The specification
- Consents
- Procurement and instructions
- The money
- Construction
- Connections
- Completion
- The trades
Construction: both revisions of the phase plan, and the photograph filed beside them.
Both revisions are there, not just the current one. What was in force in March is a different question from what is in force now, and only one of them can be answered by a folder holding the latest version.
The money: every application for payment against the order it came in under.
What you leave with
One file that somebody else can follow, and every original you were ever sent.
One PDF
The whole build as a single document, with a contents page you can press and a bookmark spine down the side.
Your originals
Every file you were sent, exactly as you were sent it, in folders that match the sections.
You keep both
They are yours whether you stay subscribed or not, with six months to come back for them.
Every document this build produced is printed into the one PDF under the section it belongs to, page for page, keeping the page numbers it was issued with. The contents at the front is not a list — each line goes to the page it names.
You choose what travels. Everything is ticked when you open it and you take out what you would rather not include; photographs are the one thing that starts off, because what prints is our reproduction rather than the file you took. Nothing counts what you left out, and there is no version called for your lender — a pack assembled for an audience leaves things out by implication, and this one is yours.