Which delays entitle you to more time, and which do not?

Think of every delay as coming over one of three fences, because that is how the contract lists are built, whatever they call things:

Delay from the client’s side: time, almost always

• Variations and extra work: instructed change that adds work adds time, and the pricing of the work itself runs separately through the variation machinery.
• Late instructions, drawings and decisions you had properly asked for.
• Not getting access to the site, or getting it late, or losing it partway.
• Work by the client’s own trades getting in your way: the kitchen company the client hired directly, the utility connection the client was arranging.

The principle underneath is old and fair: the client cannot hold you to a date they made impossible. If they could, delay damages would let them profit from their own obstruction, and where a contract has no working machinery for this at all, the completion obligation itself can come loose, time at large, a doctrine you should know exists and never plan around.

Delay from your side: no time, ever

Your subcontractor being slow, your supplier delivering late, your pricing error, your labour shortage: none of it qualifies, because you chose those people and carry that risk. The client’s list is not a complaints box. What you can do about a supplier who cost you three weeks is a claim down your own chain under that subcontract or order, not a claim up for time, and the distinction is worth a sentence in every letter you write about it.

Neutral events, and where weather really sits

Some delays are nobody’s fault, and contracts split them deliberately: some give time (protecting you from damages) but no money; others are left as your risk entirely. The list is a commercial allocation, not a moral one, which is why it differs between forms, read yours.

Weather is the one everyone gets wrong, in both directions. The standard trigger is not bad weather but exceptionally adverse weather: weather materially worse than what the season and the place would lead you to expect. February being cold and wet is not exceptional, it is February, and you are assumed to have priced for it. Three named storms in a fortnight, or the wettest March on record while your job was in groundworks, is a different conversation. Two practical consequences:

• The claim needs a comparison, not an anecdote: what the weather was (site diary, local records) against what was normal for that month. “It rained a lot” loses; “rainfall was double the monthly average during the only fortnight the roof was open” can win.
• It only counts if it actually stopped critical work. Rain during second fix internals moved nothing.

On a job for someone living in the house

This is contract machinery, so it works on a domestic job exactly as far as the contract provides it. A proper form brings its event list with it; a one-page quote brings nothing, and then delay arguments collapse into general contract law, murkier for both sides. One more reason the delay provisions belong in the quote you write at the start.

What to do this week

1. Find the delay list in your current contract, in the particulars and conditions, and read it once with this page’s three fences in mind.

2. Check the live job for unclaimed qualifying delay, late decisions are the most commonly written-off, and notify anything you find, dated today.

3. Start the site diary habit if you have not: weather, attendance, what waited and why. It is the raw material of every one of these claims.

Where the information stops

Which list your edition carries, and whether a marginal event is inside it, is a reading of your specific wording, and on an overrun with real damages exposure that reading deserves a professional hour before you commit to a position in writing.