Open to the Weather

It is the last week of October. The roofing crew has torn off the old membrane on three buildings and installed new sheathing on two of them. The balcony contractor has removed the waterproofing on 14 decks and has not yet placed the new system. The forecast shows a hard freeze in five days, then a week of rain.

Nobody has said the word "shutdown." The contractor assumes they will keep working until they can't. The board assumes the contractor has a plan. The manager is fielding calls from a resident whose ceiling has a new stain.

This is the moment where a project either gets protected or gets damaged, and it is almost always decided by whoever notices first.

The problem is not the cold. It is the open building.

We have written before about cold-weather limits: the temperatures below which adhesives, sealants, and coatings will not cure properly. That is a question about whether work can proceed.

This is a different question. It is about what happens to the parts of the building that are already open when work stops. An exposed deck, a torn-off roof, a wall with the cladding removed: each one is a hole in the building envelope, and winter is not gentle with holes. Water gets in, freezes, expands, and finds the framing. Sheathing that was meant to be covered in a week sits uncovered for a month. Materials stored outside absorb moisture. Work that was finished in September gets damaged in December.

Four questions every board should answer before the first freeze

1. What is open right now, and what is the plan to close it? Ask for a list, by building and by area, of everything currently exposed. Then ask what the contractor intends to do with each item: finish it, temporarily protect it, or leave it. If the answer to any of them is "we'll see," that is the item most likely to fail.

2. Who pays for temporary protection? Tarps, temporary roofing, plywood, tenting, heat, and the labor to install and maintain them are real costs. Whether they sit in the contractor's base price, are billed as a change order, or fall to the owner depends on the contract, and on why work stopped. If the contractor stopped because they fell behind, that is generally a different conversation than if the owner directed a shutdown. Read the contract before the conversation starts, not during it. Ask your attorney if the language is unclear.

3. Who decides to stop? Someone has to make the call that it is too late in the season to open anything else. If that authority is not assigned, the contractor will keep opening areas because they are paid to make progress, and the board will find out about it when it rains. Assign one decision-maker, typically the owner's representative or project manager, and give them a date.

4. Who is watching the protection? Temporary protection fails. Tarps blow off, seams open, drains clog with leaves. A shutdown plan without an inspection schedule is a plan to find out about the leak from a resident. Agree on who checks, how often, and after which weather events, and what the contractor must do within what time when something fails.

What a decent winter shutdown plan says

It does not need to be long. One or two pages, agreed in writing before the shutdown, covering:

• Scope status. What is complete, what is open, and what is protected, by building.

• Protection method. What will cover each open area, who installs it, and to what standard.

• Material storage. Where material sits over the winter, how it is covered, and who insures it. (If you have paid for it, it is yours to worry about. See the stored materials discussion in our next piece.)

• Inspections. Frequency, responsible party, and trigger events such as high wind, heavy snow, or a thaw.

• Restart conditions. What has to be checked, and possibly redone, before work resumes in spring, and who bears the cost of anything damaged over the winter.

• Resident communication. What residents will see, what noise or activity to expect if the crew returns for repairs, and who to call.

The cost of doing nothing

The pattern is consistent. A small amount of temporary protection, decided in October, costs a small amount of money. The same area left open, damaged, and discovered in March costs a repair, a dispute about who caused it, and a delayed restart. The dispute is the expensive part: the contractor says the owner directed the delay, the owner says the contractor left the building open, and neither can prove it because the shutdown was never written down.

The bottom line

A project does not pause cleanly. It pauses in the middle of something, and what the building looks like on the day work stops is the condition it will be in when work resumes, plus whatever the winter does in between.

Ask the four questions now, while the weather is still cooperating. Write the answers down. Then a hard freeze is a scheduled event instead of a surprise.

Next up: what happens when you approve a payment for material that has not been installed yet.