Building from a distance What happens between the inspections.

Why nobody can tell you when.

The most common question we are asked by clients who live somewhere else is some version of "when will the drywall go up", and the honest answer is that nobody outside the build can tell you reliably. Not us, and often not the sales contact who gave you a date in good faith.

Central Florida schedules move for reasons that stack on each other. Weather takes days out of the exterior work, and a lost afternoon pushes a trade into the next day, which pushes the trade behind it. Material deliveries slip. Crews get pulled to whichever house in the community is closest to a deadline. The county inspection queue has its own rhythm. Your builder can forecast their own work better than anyone on the outside, because they control some of these variables, and even they are working from estimates.

The practical consequence is the part people underestimate. You cannot plan a trip around a milestone, because the milestone moves. Book a flight to see the framing and you may arrive to find it went up nine days ago and the insulation is already in, or that it has not started. More on why dates shift.

What changes while you are not looking

The gaps matter because of what happens inside them. A house does not progress evenly. It sits for a week and then changes character in three days.

Between the pre-slab visit and the pre-drywall visit, a flat concrete pad becomes a framed building with a roof on it, wired and plumbed. Between pre-drywall and pre-closing, an open frame you could see through becomes a finished, closed house with surfaces you will live with for twenty years. If you are not there, you go from one photograph to another with the transformation missing in between.

That is also the stretch where the things worth seeing are visible for the shortest time. A vapor barrier is exposed for days. Wall cavities are open for weeks. Once a surface closes, what is behind it is a matter of record rather than observation, which is the entire reason the inspection stages sit where they do.

Why builder updates are not the same as a record

Most builders send something. A photograph when the slab pours, a note when the roof goes on, a call from the sales contact. That is genuine communication and it is worth having.

It is not a record, and the difference is not about anyone's good faith. Builder updates arrive when there is something worth celebrating, which is exactly when the house looks its best. They are not taken on a schedule, they are not comparable to each other, and they are not organized so you can look back at what the wall cavity behind your primary bedroom looked like before it closed. A photograph sent to reassure you and a photograph taken to document a condition are different things, even when they show the same wall.

What an inspection does, and what it does not

An inspection answers a specific question: is the work at this stage correct, measured against the manufacturer instructions, your builder's approved plans and the Standards of Practice. It produces a report with every finding photographed, located and explained, and it is timed to a point where what is found can still be corrected easily.

What it does not do is tell you what happened last Tuesday. It is a point measurement, not a continuous one, and it is not designed to be otherwise. Asking an inspection to keep you informed about progress is asking it to do a job it was not built for. What an inspection is, and what it is not.

What you can actually do about it

There are more options here than people realize, and they are worth knowing before you spend money on any of them.

• Ask your builder for more than a milestone photograph. Many will send more if asked specifically. Ask for wide shots of each elevation rather than close-ups of finished details, and ask before a surface closes rather than after.
• Use someone local if you genuinely have one. A family member or friend who can walk the lot on a Saturday is worth more than nothing, provided you tell them what to photograph. Wide, dated, all four sides, and the same angles each time so you can compare.
• Time your own visits to the stages that cannot be recovered. If you can only come twice, come for pre-drywall and pre-closing. What is open at pre-drywall is never visible again.
• Add 360° imaging at the inspections you book. It will not tell you what happened in between, but it gives you a navigable record of the whole house at two points rather than a set of flat photographs. What it is good for afterwards.
• Be realistic about what a drive-by achieves. From the street you can see whether a roof is on. You cannot see whether the flashing at the window openings was finished at the corners, and that is the kind of thing worth knowing.

Documentation between the stages

The option that covers the gaps directly is someone local visiting the homesite as the build moves and documenting what has been completed. ProgressCheck, same team, different service, does exactly that with On-Site Home Build Updates: a field specialist visits as construction progresses and sends photographs, a walkthrough video and a written Update Report from each visit, with licensed inspections inside the programs that include them. The 11-month warranty inspection is a Home IQ Inspections service and is booked separately. It is documentation rather than inspection, so it sits alongside the stages rather than replacing any of them. Read about ProgressCheck.

Because even a new home deserves a second set of eyes.