Contract Administration in Woodside Park

Documented building context

Barnet's May 2010 study identifies category C as predominant in its Whetstone and Woodside Park character area on printed page 102. The category's separate account on page 70 describes detached and semi-detached houses, mostly of two storeys, while the local chapter illustrates Birley Road. These are character-study categories and examples, not an address-by-address specification.

Existing-building records for the tender

For a reported repair at an altered junction, include the earlier investigation and the subsequent specification in full, retaining their access limits. Explain which sides and connecting voids can be seen now. A similar roof pitch or finish cannot establish identical construction between the original house and later accommodation, and should not be used to fill a gap in the documents for that Woodside Park building phase.

Woodside Park tender and contract decisions

For a Woodside Park instruction, prepare the tender around the particular detached or semi-detached house, rather than the study's broad category. Distinguish the principal building, later accommodation and any proposed addition on the drawings. Mark the actual roof junctions, wall openings and rooms affected, including those for which access or construction information remains unavailable.

An altered junction needs a clear design question before a contractor can price the associated investigation usefully. Identify what the designer needs to establish, where opening up would occur and which protection and reinstatement are included. Tenderers should return separate allowances for that agreed activity and the permanent work whose detail remains unresolved. This makes competing prices more intelligible without pretending that the character study supplies a structural specification.

Set out the employer's intended occupation and the route by which the contractor will reach each work area. For a semi-detached house, identify any operation near a shared boundary or adjoining element and confirm the relevant arrangements through the appropriate advisers. A broad description of suburban housing cannot establish an individual entitlement to scaffold, deliver or carry out work from another person's space.

When completing the selected JCT particulars, assign the remaining design tasks to the parties actually responsible for them and relate each task to a required decision stage. During delivery, record any change against the original junction or opening reference, with its supporting detail, price and programme explanation. Keep completion photographs and relevant product or design information by building phase, so the handover file shows what the new instruction achieved without assigning undocumented work to an assumed period of construction.

HCS cannot act as independent contract administrator where HCS is the contractor.

Contract scope

• Barnet — Characterisation Study, Final Report, May 2010: Woodside Park suburban category — PDF page 72 (printed page 70), C – Suburban: Building Types and Units; PDF page 104 (printed page 102), character description and Birley Road caption. Typology, not individual construction.

• Major works
• Tendering
• Clerk of Works
• Employer's Agent
• Insurance reinstatement

• Barnet area guide
• North Finchley
• Whetstone
• Finchley
• Totteridge
• Barnet

Professional profiles · RICS regulation