Existing Alteration History Record Checklist

Write out every alteration you know about in the order it happened, and mark each date as certain, approximate or entirely unknown.

The order of changes matters more than the dates, and marking your confidence stops an approximate date hardening into a fact by repetition.

Mark clearly the point at which your own knowledge of the property begins, and treat everything before it as second hand however confident you feel about it.

Owners absorb the account given by whoever sold them the property and repeat it as their own, which hides how thin the evidence behind it actually is.

Write down who told you about each earlier change and when, because for a professional reading your record the source often matters more than the detail.

An account traced back to somebody who was there is treated differently from one that arrived through two intermediaries.

Record changes that were started and abandoned as well as those completed, since half-finished work leaves traces without appearing in any account of the property.

Do not assume abandoned work was made good or left harmless; describe what you know and ask a qualified structural engineer what it means for your question.

Include work that sounds purely cosmetic, such as a new floor covering, a lowered ceiling, a fitted cupboard or a run of panelling, since each can hide what came before.

Cosmetic changes are the ones owners leave out of a history, and they are frequently the reason nobody can see what happened underneath.

Include anything that was done in a hurry or after damage, such as a leak, a fire, an impact from a vehicle or storm damage to the roof.

Work carried out after damage is remembered as a repair rather than a change; describe it fully and let a qualified professional decide how to treat it.

Walk the outside and look for changes in brick, stone, render or mortar, photographing every place the material or the colour of the material changes.

Material changes are the plainest evidence of earlier work available to an owner and need no tools or judgement to record.

Look for any straight vertical line running up a wall where two sections of masonry appear to meet, and record where along the wall it starts and where it stops.

A vertical join can mean several quite different things; record where it is and leave what it indicates to a qualified structural engineer.

Look for openings that appear to have been filled in, including a blocked doorway, a bricked window, an old coal chute or a former ventilation opening.

Filled openings are usually still readable from outside long after they have vanished from the inside of the property.

Photograph the point where a roof line, eaves or gutter changes height or direction along the building, and say which side of the property it is on.

A step in the roof line often marks where one part of the building was added to another, even where the walls have since been rendered over.

Photograph any part of the building that is obviously a later addition, and record how it appears to meet the original walls at each junction.

How an addition is connected to the original building is a question for a qualified structural engineer; photograph the junction rather than describing what it does.

Record any sign that something was once attached to a wall and has since gone, such as a render scar, a row of filled holes or a stub of masonry at low level.

Removed lean-tos, outbuildings and canopies leave marks that nobody thinks to mention because they are no longer part of the building.

Count the chimney stacks visible from outside and how many pots or openings each one carries, then work out which rooms each would once have served.

Comparing what is on the roof with what is in the rooms below is something an owner can do in an afternoon and rarely thinks to.

Go through the property room by room and note where a chimney breast is present, where one appears to have gone and where a fireplace has been blocked up.

Whether a chimney breast has been removed and what carries whatever remains is a matter for a qualified structural engineer, never something to conclude from a surface.

Where you can look into the roof space, note whether the brickwork of each stack continues down through the floor of that space or appears to stop.

Do not move insulation, boarding or stored items to see more; describe only what is visible from where you are already standing and leave the rest to a professional.

Say whether any room has a flue that appears to be in use, whether for a stove, a boiler, a gas fire or an open fire, and what is connected to it.

Anything connected to a flue is a matter for the appropriately registered trade for that appliance; do not open, block or alter a flue on your own account.

Record where a stack appears to have been taken down to or below roof level, judged from outside, and photograph what remains of it.

A stack removed above the roof while everything below stayed in place is common and is easy for an owner to spot from the garden.

Note any hearth, alcove or shallow recess that suggests a fireplace was once there, even where nothing about it is visible in the room now.

Traces of a fireplace often survive in the floor or the shape of a room long after the opening itself has been closed and plastered over.

Where you can enter the roof space securely, photograph the timbers and note anywhere new-looking timber sits alongside older darker timber.

Roof spaces can be hazardous and a ceiling below will not carry your weight; do not enter a space you have any doubts about, and ask a qualified professional to look instead.

Photograph anywhere a timber appears to have been cut, notched or to end without continuing, rather than trying to describe in words what it is doing.

Whether an altered timber matters is entirely a question for a qualified structural engineer; do not touch, prop or make good anything you find.

Record any post, strut or prop in the roof space that looks like a later addition, and note what it appears to stand on in the storey below.

Do not remove or reposition anything found supporting a roof, however temporary it looks; ask a qualified structural engineer what it is doing there.

Note whether the roof covering appears to have been changed at some point, judged from what is visible on the underside from inside the space.

A recovered roof often shows as new boarding or membrane above older timbers, and the change is invisible from the street.

Record whether the roof space has been boarded out, insulated or partly converted at some point, and note what is currently stored on the ceiling below.

Boarding and stored belongings are alterations in their own right and are among the first things an engineer asks about.

Describe any water tank in the roof space, where it sits, what it appears to rest on and whether it looks as though it has been moved or left disused.

Tanks get moved during earlier work and the old position often still shows, which tells a professional something about what was done.

Walk each room and note where a floor changes level, springs underfoot or slopes, describing it plainly rather than trying to measure it.

Plain descriptions of what a floor does are useful, whereas owner measurements risk being mistaken for survey information later.

Look for places where the ceiling height changes between one room and the next, and say whether the change looks original to the building or added later.

A dropped ceiling in one room only is a strong clue that something was done there, and it is obvious once you look for it.

Look for a patch of newer floorboards or a line where boards change, and note which way the boards run on either side of that line.

The direction boards run is something an owner can see without lifting anything, and a change in direction is worth recording.

Note any bulkhead, dropped section or boxed-in run in a ceiling or a corner, and write down what you believe is inside it and why you believe that.

Do not open a boxed-in section to find out what it contains; record where it is and ask the qualified professionals what they need to know about it.

Record where a door opening appears to have been widened, narrowed, moved or closed up, including one you can only see the outline of in a wall.

An altered opening is a fact to record, not a conclusion to draw; whether anything was done above it is for a qualified structural engineer to establish.

Listen for any internal wall that sounds different along its length, treating it strictly as something you noticed rather than as a finding about the wall.

Tapping a wall establishes nothing about what it does; never treat this as evidence and never plan any removal around it.

Look through everything received when the property was bought for references to earlier alterations, however brief, including answers given by the seller.

Enquiries answered during a purchase often mention past work in a single line that nobody has read since.

List the paperwork you would expect to exist for each alteration and mark clearly which of it you have looked for and could not find.

Recording an unsuccessful search is far more useful than silence, because it tells a professional the gap is real rather than unexamined.

Ask the relevant local authority what records they hold for the property, and confirm locally what an owner is able to obtain and how.

What records are held and what can be released varies by area; take the answer from the local authority itself rather than from anybody else.

Keep any handover paperwork issued when earlier work finished, even where the firm involved has long since stopped trading or the cover has ended.

Expired paperwork still records what was done, who did it and when, which is often the only written trace of an alteration.

Note whether any earlier work was carried out under an insurance claim and keep every piece of correspondence about it that you can find.

Anything relating to a past claim should be discussed with your own insurer, since positions vary between policies and providers.

Record where paperwork is said to exist but you have only been told about it, so the difference between holding a document and hearing of one stays visible.

A document somebody mentioned has a habit of becoming a document in the file, right up until the moment somebody asks to see it.

Ask long-standing neighbours what they remember being done at the property, and write down the words they use rather than your summary of them.

A neighbour who watched scaffolding go up remembers when and roughly what, which is more than most paperwork will tell you.

Ask whether the previous owner holds anything about earlier work, going through whoever handled the sale, and record the reply whether or not it is helpful.

A recorded refusal or non-answer is itself information, and it stops the same enquiry being made again later.

Note who is remembered as having carried out any past work, without treating a recollected name as though it were a record of what was done.

A remembered name occasionally leads to paperwork that still exists somewhere, which is the only reason to note it.

Ask anybody who has worked at the property since you arrived what they noticed while floors, walls or ceilings were open at the time.

Trades see things nobody else ever will, and that observation is lost the moment the surface goes back on.

Record each recollection with the date you heard it and who said it, since memory is evidence of a kind but a notably weak kind.

Undated recollections merge into the general account of the property and become impossible to weigh afterwards.

Treat anything a neighbour tells you about their own property as being about their property, and check before repeating it as a fact about yours.

Assumptions carried across from a neighbouring property are a common source of error; ask the qualified professionals to establish what applies to yours.

Mark every entry in the record as seen, told or assumed, and keep the three categories apart even where you feel entirely confident about one of them.

Anybody reading the record later needs to know which parts would survive being challenged and which would not.

Give every photograph a location and a date, since a picture of a join or a patch means nothing to anybody who cannot tell which wall it is.

Unlabelled photographs are the most common wasted effort in an owner record, because nobody can place them afterwards.

Keep the record in one place rather than spread across notes on a phone, a paper folder and your own memory of what you meant.

A record assembled from three places always turns out to disagree with itself at the moment somebody asks a question about it.

Add corrections to the record rather than tidying earlier entries away, so that a change of understanding shows what you previously believed.

What you thought before you looked properly is sometimes the most revealing part of the whole record.

Hand over the whole record rather than a summary of it, and let the professional decide which parts of it matter to the question being asked.

Owner summaries drop the detail a qualified structural engineer would have found significant; give them everything and let them sort it.