What does "making good" mean, and who is supposed to do it?

Nearly every dispute at the end of a domestic job is about making good, and nearly all of those disputes exist because the phrase was in a quote and nobody defined it. It is worth ten minutes at the start, and it is very hard to resolve at the end when the money has already been spent.

Step by step

1. Understand what it usually covers.The surfaces the work itself disturbed, returned to a sound and finished state: chases filled, holes made good, plaster patched flush, a floor left level and continuous, a ceiling made ready for paint.
2. Understand what it usually does not cover.Decorating. Matching an existing wallpaper or a specific paint. Replacing a whole floor covering because a patch cannot be matched. Making the room look as though the work never happened. Each of those is a separate item with a separate price.
3. Accept that matching is nearly impossible.A patch of new plaster in an old wall dries differently and takes paint differently. A repaired section of a textured ceiling shows. A replacement floorboard is a different age. Where a room has to look right afterwards, the answer is usually to redecorate the whole surface, and that is a decision to make and price at the start.
4. Write down the standard, not the word."Making good" in a quote means whatever the two of you later think it meant. "Chases filled and plastered flush, walls left ready for mist coat, ceiling skimmed where disturbed, no decoration included" means one thing only.
5. Decide who is doing the decorating before the work starts.It changes the sequence, and it changes what standard the making good has to reach. A builder leaving a wall for a decorator finishes it differently from one leaving it for the householder with a roller.
6. Look at the boundaries between trades.The gaps are where making good disappears. Who fills round the new socket, the electrician or the plasterer? Who makes good where the plumber lifted the floor? Ask at the quote stage, because each trade assumes the next one is doing it.
7. Inspect making good in daylight, from an angle.Hold a light flat against the surface. A patch that looks perfect straight on shows every ripple in raking light, and once it is painted it shows that way permanently.
8. Raise it before the final payment.Making good is the classic snagging item, and the final payment is the only leverage that reliably gets it done. GuideHQ has a guide on doing a snagging list properly.

Tips

• Photograph the surfaces before the work. "It was like that before" is the commonest defence and a photograph settles it in seconds.
• If a room is being redecorated anyway, say so at quote stage — it genuinely reduces what the making good has to achieve, and an honest builder will price it lower.
• Keep leftover paint, tiles and flooring from any previous work, labelled with the room. A matched patch is only possible if the material still exists.

Common mistakes

• Assuming making good includes decorating — It almost never does. This single assumption causes more end-of-job arguments than anything else in domestic building work.
• Expecting an invisible patch in an old finish — New plaster, new paint and new timber all behave differently from old. A good patch is flush and sound; invisible is a different job and usually means doing the whole surface.
• Paying in full and then raising it — Making good is exactly the kind of item that stops happening once the money has gone. Raise it, list it, agree it, then pay.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask