Court Project Documentation Preparation Checklist

Find the title plan or ownership papers for the property and note what they appear to show about the boundary nearest the proposed court area.

Almost every professional you approach will ask for this first, and finding it can take longer than expected if a club or a committee holds it.

What a title plan, deed or covenant means for a court project is interpreted by a suitably qualified legal professional, never read off the page by an owner.

Note whether any covenant, easement, right of way or shared access appears in the papers, and list each one without trying to work out its effect.

Whether a restriction affects what may be built on a site is confirmed with a suitably qualified legal professional and with the local authority.

Gather any lease, licence or agreement under which the land is held or used, particularly where a club plays on ground it does not own.

Clubs frequently discover late that the party who must agree to the work is not the party running the project.

Collect anything showing where the site boundary runs, and mark any place where the line on paper and the fence on the ground appear to disagree.

A court is usually pushed towards a boundary, which is exactly where a discrepancy between the paper line and the fence becomes painful to discover late.

Note whether the land is held by a trust, a committee, a school or a local body, and write down who actually has authority to agree to work on it.

Authority to agree and enthusiasm for the project often sit with different people, and only one of them can sign anything.

Look for any earlier survey, level drawing or ground report held for the site, even if it was produced for something completely unrelated.

Old surveys hold information that would otherwise have to be gathered again, and they are usually filed somewhere nobody has looked.

Collect any drawings or service records showing what runs under or across the site, and note who provided each one and when.

Records of buried services are rarely complete; what is actually below ground is established on site by suitably qualified professionals before any digging.

Note any earlier work carried out on the site, such as levelling, filling, drainage or a former hard surface, and gather any paperwork that came with it.

What was done to the ground before shapes what can be done now, and made ground is one of the things a professional will ask about immediately.

Gather anything held about an existing court, including who laid it, what was used and what has been done to it since.

For a resurfacing or conversion this history is the single most valuable document in the file, and it is usually the hardest to find.

Record where the water and power supply points, access covers, chambers, stopcocks and gullies sit on the site, and photograph each one where it stands.

These get covered over during work and become impossible to locate afterwards, which is a problem inherited by whoever comes next.

Note any tree on or near the site that may carry protection, and list it as something to confirm locally rather than as something to judge yourself.

Whether a tree carries protection is confirmed with the local authority, and what work is possible near one is for a qualified arboricultural professional.

Collect any paperwork about the fence, wall or hedge on each boundary, including anything indicating who owns and looks after it.

A court enclosure often meets a boundary structure, and ownership of that structure decides who has to be consulted.

Write down what the court is for, who would play on it and to what standard, in plain language you would be happy to hand to a stranger.

If it cannot be written in plain language it has not been decided yet, and a professional will spend the first meeting drawing it out of you anyway.

Record each decision alongside the reason for it, since the reason is what disappears first and what somebody will later ask about.

Later on, a decision with no reason attached looks arbitrary and gets reopened by whoever inherits the project.

Note the options considered and set aside, and why, so the same ground is not walked over again by a new adviser or a new committee.

Rejected options return unless the reason for rejecting them is written down, which wastes the time of everybody involved.

Write down what has been ruled out entirely, such as a position, a sport or a feature the household or the club does not want.

Stating the limits of the brief is as useful to a designer as stating its ambitions, and it is far less commonly done.

Record who was involved in each decision, particularly where a committee, a household or a group of members had to agree to it.

Where a decision came from determines who can change it, and that becomes important the moment somebody wants to.

Keep a note of anything agreed verbally on site, since site conversations are where most undocumented decisions on a project are made.

A decision made standing on the ground it concerns is usually the right decision and almost never the recorded one.

Keep every message to and from the local authority together, including the question you asked and the exact wording of any reply.

Replies are given in response to a specific question, so the question has to be kept alongside the answer for either to mean anything.

What applies to your court project is confirmed locally with the local authority; information about another site should never be treated as an answer for yours.

Record the date and the name of anybody you spoke to, and write down what you understood from the conversation while it is still fresh.

Spoken guidance is easy to misremember, and a contemporaneous note is much easier to check later than a recollection.

Keep whatever the relevant governing body publishes or sends you about facilities at your level of play, and note which version you are holding.

Governing body material is revised over time, and what applies to your project is confirmed with that body directly rather than from a stored copy.

Write down the questions you have asked and not yet had answered, so open points do not quietly disappear into the folder.

Unanswered questions look identical to answered ones once they are filed, and a separate open list is the only thing that keeps them visible.

Note whether a neighbour, an adjoining owner or another user group has written to you about the project, and keep those messages with the file.

Early correspondence from neighbours is often the most useful record you will have if the project becomes contested later.

Record whether a professional is corresponding on your behalf, and ask to receive a copy of what is sent as well as what comes back.

A file with only the replies in it tells half the story, and the half missing is usually the one that matters.

Put a date and a short label on every sketch you produce yourself, including the rough ones done on the back of something else.

Owner sketches circulate further than anybody expects, and an undated one can still be in use long after it stopped being true.

Note which drawing each professional is working from, and check that it is the same one before any meeting on site.

This single check prevents the most common and most damaging kind of misunderstanding on a small project.

Keep superseded drawings rather than discarding them, but mark them clearly enough that nobody picks one up by mistake.

The history of a design explains decisions that the current drawing cannot, but only if the old sheets cannot be mistaken for live ones.

Record what any drawing you hold does not show, such as levels, services or anything beyond the edge of the site.

What a drawing does and does not cover is confirmed with whoever produced it; an owner should never assume that something shown has been surveyed.

Note whether each drawing was measured, surveyed or estimated by eye, and who produced it, since these are treated very differently.

A sketch relied on as though it were a survey is one of the more damaging misunderstandings available on a court project.

Ask which of the drawings would be issued to a contractor, and keep a copy of exactly what was issued rather than what was intended.

The issued set is the one the work follows, so it is the one your record needs to match.

Photograph the whole site before anything changes, including the areas nobody expects the work to touch.

The parts nobody expected to be affected are exactly the parts that turn out to be disputed afterwards.

Take photographs from positions you can return to, and note where you stood for each one so the sequence can be compared later.

Repeatable positions turn a pile of photographs into a record of change rather than a set of unrelated images.

Photograph the condition of access routes, verges, gates and neighbouring surfaces before any machinery arrives on the site.

Damage to the route is common, unremarkable at the time and impossible to discuss later without a before image.

Record observations that only exist for a moment, such as where water sat after heavy rain or where frost lay longest.

These observations cannot be recreated on demand, and they are among the first things a professional will ask you about.

Note the condition of anything shared with a neighbour, such as a boundary fence or a wall, before any work is planned near it.

Ownership of a boundary structure is established from the papers by a suitably qualified legal professional, never assumed from which side the posts sit on.

Keep photographs with the written file rather than only on a phone, and note who else holds copies of them.

Images stranded on one device are lost as completely as anything else when that device is replaced.

Decide where the project file lives, keep it in one place, and tell everybody involved where that place is.

Files split across several people become several incomplete files, none of which can be relied on.

Note whether the file exists on paper, on a device or both, and consider what would happen to it if that device were lost or replaced.

Most small project records are lost this way rather than through carelessness about the papers themselves.

Give each document a name that says what it is and who produced it, rather than leaving whatever name it arrived with.

A folder of documents nobody can identify without opening them is only marginally better than no folder.

List what you are still missing, so the gaps in the file stay visible instead of being assumed to be filled.

The gap you have written down gets chased, and the gap you have not written down gets discovered by somebody else.

Decide who else can reach the file, particularly where a committee will change or one household member is handling the project alone.

Continuity is the point of the file, and continuity that depends on one person is not continuity at all.

Agree how the file would be handed over if the court changes hands or the committee changes, and write that arrangement into the file itself.

The next owner or committee inherits the court either way; whether they inherit the knowledge is decided here.