The fit-out lifecycle, end to end

Every fit-out job you have ever run has passed through the same set of stages. You did not call them that, and the borders between them were fuzzy, but the work happened in the same order every time. Giving those stages names is not ceremony. It is how you stop one of them being quietly dropped.

The stages, in the order they actually happen

A fit-out moves through these stages. Each one has a job to do, and a way of telling you it is finished.

1. Enquiry

   The client asks for something. Your job here is not to price it — it is to understand what they actually want and whether you want the job at all.

2. Survey

   You go and look. You measure, you photograph, you find out what is already there and what is behind the walls you cannot see. Nothing serious is priced before this happens.

3. Design

   Drawings, material choices, and the layout are fixed enough that a price and a programme can be built on them. For small jobs this can be a sketch and a material schedule; for large ones it is a full drawing pack.

4. BOQ

   The bill of quantities turns the design into numbered lines with quantities, units, and rates. This single document becomes the spine for everything that follows.

5. Award

   The contract is signed, or the purchase order is raised. The job now has money against it and a date it is expected to finish.

6. Procurement

   Materials are ordered and subcontractors are booked. Long-lead items — joinery, marble, switchgear — are chased first, because they decide the programme.

7. Site

   The work goes in. Trades are sequenced, progress is measured against the programme, and problems are caught while they are still cheap to fix.

8. Snagging

   The list of small unfinished or defective items is worked down until the space is genuinely complete, not just “mostly done”.

9. Handover

   The client takes the space. A signed handover is the line between “still our problem” and “now their building”.

10. Defects liability period (DLP)

    For a fixed time after handover — often six or twelve months — you remain liable for defects that appear. Retention money is held back against this and released when the period ends clean.

What “moving on” means

A stage is finished when its output exists and has been agreed, not when you are simply tired of it. Survey is done when the measurements and photographs are recorded. Design is done when the drawings are issued and the client has marked them approved. Procurement is done when the orders are placed and acknowledged, not when the supplier has been “chased”.

The trap is moving on without the output. You price without a survey, you order without an approved drawing, you hand over without a cleared snag list. Each shortcut feels like speed. It is actually debt, and it collects interest in the next stage.

Stages overlap, and that is normal

The stages are a checklist of things that must each happen, in a sensible order. They are not a rule that one must be perfectly closed before the next can start. Confusing the two is how jobs either slip behind, or rush ahead into trouble.

The one stage nobody can skip

If there is a single stage that gets skipped and is always regretted, it is the survey. A price built from a phone call and a few photos is a guess, and the bill for the guess arrives later — when the marble does not fit the niche, or the cable route turns out to cross a structural beam, or the lift will not carry the joinery to the floor you priced it for.

The survey is cheap. It is a site visit and a few hours. Rework on site, in front of a waiting client, is not.

What this looks like in Taskity

You will see these stages again as the states a project moves through. A project starts in one state and is pushed forward to the next, and the work inside it — tasks, orders, snag items — is grouped under whatever stage the project is in. The names match the work you already do; the software just makes the current stage visible to the whole team at once.

Check what you learned