Before the gate
You learn to read a site before you reach the slab. Material stacked wrong means the morning was spent badly. Labour absent at ten means the day is already lost. The contractor's face tells you whether he has been reading the drawing or improvising around it. None of this is on the checklist, and all of it informs it.
Each project in the district gets two visits a week, two to three hours each; on heavy days the whole working day goes to sites, and the practice's sites sit within a few kilometres of each other so the hours go to supervision instead of to the road.
First: the drawing against the work
The first hour is the recorded core of every visit: contrast the drawing with the on-site progress, and correct the deviations the contractor has made.
Not the other way round, and not a negotiation. The drawing is the agreement. The comparison walks the plan: dimensions at the wall against the mason's sheet, levels against the numbers, the line of a wall against the grid. Most deviations are small and cheap to correct the week they happen. The same deviations, found at lintel level or after plaster, cost the client weeks.
The most common deviations in the district are the recorded ones: level differences, and design inappropriation, a built element that stands where the drawing has something else. Both come from the same root, a contractor working from memory instead of the sheet, and both are why the sheet itself is designed to be readable, as in Drawings a contractor can actually read.
Second: the detailing conversation
Quality control here is not a report; it is a conversation at the exact spot where the work is wrong. The contractor is shown the detail, the defect is named, and the correction is agreed standing up, in front of the work, while it is still wet.
This is also where deviations get diagnosed rather than just corrected. When the contractor is the client's own man, deviations repeat, and the conversation has to include the client: this is what the drawing says, this is what has been built, the difference is his choice to make with his money, but the choice must be made with both facts on the table.
Third: the schedule push
The recorded job does not end at correctness: push the project toward completion on schedule. A building that is correct but slow is failing the client differently. The visit ends where it began, at sequence: what the next week must produce, in what order, with which labour, so that the next visit has something specific to check.
What two visits a week is actually worth
A deviation caught wet is a conversation. The same deviation caught dry is a demolition. The visits are priced into the engagement's supervision stage, as on how we work, and clients occasionally ask whether they can be reduced to save the fee. After thirty years, the answer in this journal is the honest one: the weeks you skip are the weeks the building quietly stops matching the drawing, and nobody finds out until the cost is structural.
What the drawings and stages of an engagement deliver is on what you receive.