Specification Review Preparation Checklist

Establish which document is the specification, since the word is used for a standalone written document, a block of notes on a drawing and a supplier data sheet alike.

Owners often read one of the three and assume they have seen what the work is meant to be, when the binding wording sits somewhere else entirely.

Ask whether the written wording is a separate document or text placed on the drawings, because that changes where you look when something later turns out to be unclear.

Wording on a drawing travels with that sheet and disappears when the sheet is superseded, which a separate document does not do.

Note the issue marking and date on the specification and check them against the issue of the drawings you hold, so you know the two were meant to go together.

A specification revised after the drawings, or the other way round, is one of the quieter sources of disagreement on site.

Find out who wrote each part of the document, since sections are often drafted by different people and assembled into one file for issue.

Ask the appointed professionals who authored each section and who is coordinating between them rather than treating the document as one voice.

Ask whether any part of the document came from a standard library of clauses and has not yet been edited for your property, and note the sections you suspect.

Library wording describing rooms, materials or trades that are not in your project is common and tends to survive several issues unnoticed.

Do not delete or amend wording you believe is irrelevant; put it on your query list for the professional who issued the document.

Read the whole document once without stopping to react, marking only the passages you did not follow, before going back to work through them properly.

Reading and reacting at the same time produces a list of preferences rather than a list of things you genuinely did not understand.

Write each query as a question about what the clause requires and of whom, rather than as a comment on whether you like what it says.

Questions about meaning get technical answers; comments about preference get read as change requests and are handled quite differently.

List every clause that places a duty on you as the owner, such as providing access, making a selection or supplying an item, because nobody else will chase those.

Owner duties written into a specification are easy to read past, and they surface as delays that appear to have come from nowhere.

Look for wording that makes something subject to approval, and ask whose approval is meant, at what point it is sought and what it settles.

Ask the appointed professionals what an approval under this document commits you to before you are ever asked to give one.

Do not treat a clause as something you can act on directly, and do not relay your reading of one to a trade as though it came from the author.

Owner interpretation passed on as professional wording causes real problems on site; refer questions back to the professional who wrote the clause.

Highlight every clause that refers to another document, schedule or drawing, and check that you actually hold the thing being referred to.

A specification frequently rests on documents the owner has never been sent, and the reference is the only sign that they exist.

Separate clauses that name a particular item from clauses that describe how something must perform, and keep the two groups apart on your query list.

A named item can be checked on delivery; a performance requirement can only be settled by whoever is qualified to judge that it has been met.

Where a clause describes performance rather than naming a product, ask who selects the item that will meet it and who checks that selection.

Judging whether an item meets a stated performance requirement is a professional matter; ask which appointed party is carrying it out.

Where a clause names a particular item, ask whether an alternative may be offered, who may propose one and who decides whether it is accepted.

Never accept a substitution on your own judgement; a proposed alternative belongs with the professional who wrote the clause.

Note any wording that allows an item of similar or equivalent quality to be offered, and ask what similar means here and who determines that it has been met.

Equivalence wording is where a specified intention most often drifts, because everybody assumes somebody else is applying a test to it.

Ask what is meant to happen if a specified item cannot be obtained, who is told first and who decides what goes in instead.

Unavailability is discovered at the point of ordering, when the person finding out is often the least well placed to decide the answer.

Write down which selections you want to be involved in personally and which you are content to leave to the specification, and pass that list on.

Owners who do not say which choices matter to them are either consulted about everything or about nothing, and both go badly.

List every point where the document says something is to be selected, confirmed or agreed later, and write down who is expected to make each of those calls.

Deferred selections are invisible until they hold something else up, and the register of them rarely exists anywhere else.

Ask what information the person making each later selection needs from you, and at what point in the work they need to have it.

Selections left with the owner are chased at the moment they start blocking other work, which is the worst moment to be making them.

Note items described only in general terms, such as ironmongery, trims or fixings, and ask whether a separate schedule exists that names them properly.

Generic descriptions look complete on the page but leave the actual choice entirely open, usually to whoever is ordering.

Ask which items you are expected to supply yourself and what the specification assumes about their delivery, condition and fixing arrangements.

Ask the professional who wrote the clause what the document assumes you will provide, and by what point it expects to have it.

Record where a clause defers to a manufacturer instruction, and ask who obtains that instruction, who reads it and who is bound by it.

Manufacturer requirements vary by product and situation; ask the installer and the specifying professional to confirm what applies here.

Ask which items are to be shown to you as a physical sample and which are settled from the written wording alone, and note the difference on your list.

Owners are often surprised at how much is decided without anything ever being placed in front of them.

Note that looking at a sample settles appearance and little else, and ask what else has to be established about the same item before it can be used.

Accepting how something looks is not acceptance of its suitability, which stays with the professionals and the installer.

Ask where a sample will be viewed, and whether you can see it in the room and light it is destined for rather than under a workshop or showroom light.

Colour, sheen and grain read very differently under different light, and a sample seen in the wrong place misleads honestly.

Write down what happens to a sample once it has been seen, and who keeps it so that deliveries can be compared against the thing you actually looked at.

A sample nobody retained cannot settle a later disagreement about whether the delivered item matches.

Ask whether any mock-up is planned, what it is intended to settle, who attends when it is looked at and what is recorded afterwards.

What a mock-up establishes is for the appointed professionals to set out in writing, including what it deliberately left unsettled.

List everything the document says is excluded or not included, and put each one on your question list rather than assuming it is not needed on your project.

An exclusion tells you only that the wording stops there, never that the work itself can safely be left out of the project.

Ask what an item described as provisional or as an allowance actually covers, and what is meant to happen once the real item is chosen.

How provisional items are handled is a contract matter; take the wording to your own legal adviser rather than interpreting it yourself.

Note wording that leaves part of the work to be designed by the contractor or a supplier, and ask who reviews that design once it appears.

Design produced by another party still needs coordinating; ask the appointed professionals who is reviewing it and against what.

Check whether making good, decoration and clearing away are described anywhere in the document, since they are frequently assumed rather than written down.

The finishing work at the edges of a job is where owner expectations and written wording most often part company.

Ask whether anything specified depends on something being found in the existing building, and what the document says should happen if it is not there.

What happens when the building differs from an assumption belongs with the qualified professionals; settle beforehand who must be told and who may hold work.

Read each section of the specification with the drawing showing the same work beside it, and note wherever the two appear to describe different things.

Text and drawings are usually produced at different moments, and the gap between them is visible only when they are compared directly.

Check that room names and references used in the written document match the ones printed on the drawings, and note every mismatch you find.

A room called one thing in the text and another on the plan produces confident conversations in which two people mean different spaces.

Note where the specification says nothing about something clearly drawn, and ask which document is meant to carry the description of that work.

Where a drawing and the written document disagree, ask the appointed professionals which prevails rather than deciding for yourself.

Look for finishes or trades described for rooms and areas that are not part of your scheme, which usually points at wording carried over from elsewhere.

Unedited text is not just untidy; it makes it unclear what was actually intended for the rooms you do have.

Where a schedule of items exists, check that every item on it is described somewhere in the specification, and list the ones that are not.

Schedules and written wording are often maintained separately, so an item added to one may never have reached the other.

Record which issue of the specification and which issue of the drawings you compared, so the exercise can be repeated sensibly after either is revised.

Without that note, a later revision means starting the comparison again from nothing.

Send your queries as a numbered list against clause references and section headings rather than describing your concerns in prose.

A query without a reference cannot be answered precisely, and vague questions tend to attract reassuring rather than useful replies.

Ask for any changed wording to be reissued in the document itself rather than explained in a message, so the specification stays the single record.

Clauses amended by email exist only in one inbox, and the document everybody else is working from still says the old thing.

Say which of your queries need answering before anything is ordered or started, and which can wait until a later stage of the work.

Sorting your own list this way is the single most useful thing you can do to get the urgent answers first.

Keep the specification exactly as it was issued, unmarked, alongside the copy you have annotated for your own use.

Annotated copies circulate as easily as clean ones, and owner notes have been mistaken for issued wording more than once.

Where an answer changes what is specified, ask whether that counts as a change to the agreed work and who is responsible for recording it.

Whether an answer amounts to a change is a matter for the appointed professionals and your own contract, not something to settle by email.