The end of maintenance: the second day everything changes, and nobody notes it

The switchover day module describes acceptance as the one moment when four regimes change state together. There is a second such moment, less spectacular and just as costly: the end of the maintenance period. On that day a cover lapses, retention is released, a bond is returned, and all that remains are the statutory warranties, which do not cover the same things. Nobody celebrates it, nobody notes it, and it arrives on its own through the passage of time.

What lapses first is the maintenance period itself, whose three forms the corresponding module showed. Depending on which one applies, what disappears is cover for what the contractor breaks on returning, or for defects appearing and arising from the execution, or both plus the rest. A defect appearing the day before expiry still comes under that cover; the same defect discovered two days later does not, and nothing in the works changed between the two dates.

What takes over is not equivalent, and that is the point projects miss. The statutory warranties, described in their module, are not insurance but liabilities falling on the builders, and above all they do not cover the same defects. The proper-functioning warranty lasts two years on separable items only; the ten-year one requires harm to soundness or use. Between what the maintenance period covered and what the statutory warranties cover lies a space of defects that harm nothing serious and bear on no separable item, and that space is protected by nobody after expiry.

Release of the retention happens at the same moment and deserves to be seen for what it is: the disappearance of the project owner's only concrete lever. While retention is held, a contractor comes back to make good a defect because it wants its money. Once released, it comes back only under legal obligation, which means reminding it, writing to it, then possibly having a third party say so. The balance of power reverses with no clause having changed, and the reservations module showed that this lever is also lost when reservations drag on, but in the other direction.

A calendar asymmetry must be added, which sectional acceptance, described in the acceptance module, makes frequent. On a complex accepted in several stages, each section has its maintenance period and therefore its expiry date, and those dates spread over months. The works then find themselves partly under cover and partly outside it, and a defect at the interface of two sections is argued according to which one it is decided to sit in. It is the exact counterpart of the gap described at acceptance, occurring at the other end of the period.

A practical consequence concerns knowledge and joins the after-the-loss module: at the end of maintenance, the site teams have long gone. The site engineer is no longer there, the contractor has reassigned its people, and the project owner has handed the works to an operator that never saw the site. A defect appearing then is therefore poorly documented, not from ill will but because nobody was present when the thing was built. The documentation of the repair, called for in the after-the-loss module, serves here for the first time.

What must be done lies in a review, made one month before expiry and never after. Take the list of reservations still open and decide, for each, whether to abandon it or have it performed while a lever still exists. Walk the works with somebody who saw the site, while one remains. Check that the warranties taking over actually cover the defects one fears, and not others. And on a sectional acceptance, lay the expiry dates side by side, because they do not coincide and nobody else looks at them together.