The Installer Handoff: What Your Crew Needs Before the First Lock Goes On

Installation week rarely fails because a crew lacks skill. It fails because somebody needed a number that nobody wrote down: which model goes on which door, which carton belongs to which zone, or what to do when a frame arrives slightly out of tolerance and the schedule assumed it would not.

A handoff packet is the cure, and it is much cheaper than the problem. This article lays out what to assemble before the first lock comes out of its carton, for project buyers preparing a building for handover, for installers arriving on site, and for distributors supporting both.

The six numbers on the door schedule

Everything an installer needs to fit a lock starts as a row on the door schedule. Six entries do most of the work, and all of them should be filled before hardware leaves the warehouse:

• Door thickness. The most common fit failure. CaremLock DS-series deadbolts are documented to fit door thicknesses of 35–55 mm, but that is the supported envelope, not an assumption. Each door still needs its actual thickness recorded, because renovation doors often sit at the edge of a range.
• Backset. Standard backsets of 60 mm and 70 mm appear in the DS-series documentation. The door’s bore decides which one applies, and the schedule should record it per door rather than defaulting to a single value.
• Handing. Which side the door is hinged on, described from outside. When the term itself causes debate on site, our door handing and swing vocabulary guide settles it with a five-minute walk-around at the door.
• Swing. Inswing or outswing. It changes the latch bevel direction and sometimes the frame conditions, so it belongs in the same row.
• Height. The centerline height for the lock or bore, so keypads and handles land at consistent, reachable positions on every floor.
• Width. The door leaf width, which sets lever clearance and the distance between the lock and the frame edge.

Two of the six are orientation values rather than measurements, but they belong in the same column set because the same five-minute walk-around answers all of them. The measurement method, including door preparation checks, is covered in our door compatibility guide.

What belongs in the handoff packet

The packet is a small set of documents that lets an installer work without calling anyone for the first ninety percent of the job. Five items cover a typical multi-door installation:

1. A door-by-door list. Not “40 apartment doors” but forty rows, each carrying the six schedule values above. Rows are how exceptions stay visible instead of being discovered on site: the one door that needs a 70 mm backset in a block of 60 mm doors, the outswing stairwell door, the unit with a deeper frame.

2. Model mapping. Which model goes on which door group, and why, so that a question about the entrance door does not reopen decisions already settled for the back doors.

3. A credentials and override plan. Who holds master access during construction, how temporary codes or keys are issued, and who clears them at handover. This is a governance question, but it turns into an installer question the moment a locked door blocks another trade.

4. An escalation contact, with hours. One phone number for fit and hardware questions, and a clear rule for after-hours. The contact should be someone who can answer with the documentation in front of them; spec sheets and installation information for the models on site are available on request.

5. Spare parts counts. How many spare fasteners, gaskets and lock units travel to site. Spares are cheapest inside the original order and most expensive as an emergency call.

Box-to-door mapping

On paper, forty locks are forty lock units. On site, they are cartons, and cartons are where installation week gets lost when their contents are not labeled to match the schedule.

CaremLock cartons are documented to carry model and quantity data, with 20 pcs per carton on the DS line. That is the minimum viable label: it tells the crew what each box contains. What it does not do by itself is map a box to a zone or door group, and that mapping is what the handoff packet should spell out.

The practical fix is a labeling rule agreed before dispatch: one label per carton matching one model and one zone, with the schedule reference printed on it. A carton destined for the third floor should not be indistinguishable from one headed for the lobby, even when they hold identical locks. On custom-branded and multi-group orders this becomes part of the pre-dispatch checklist, the same discipline described in our custom branded order QC notes.

Photos and site conditions

Schedules are written from drawings; locks are installed into doors that have been hung, painted and adjusted by other trades. Three photographs, taken a week before installation begins, catch most of the mismatch between the two:

• The closed door from outside. Shows the door’s current alignment against the frame, plus anything mounted on or around it (signage, closers, hooks) that never appeared on the drawing.
• The open door edge, with a tape measure at the lock bore. This photograph confirms the backset, and the tape in frame makes it a measurement rather than an impression.
• The frame conditions. Check and strike side, with the existing strike, weatherstripping or frame damage visible. Frame problems are far cheaper to correct before locks arrive than after.

Name the files so they are findable (building, floor, door number) and attach them to the packet. The same three-photo method answers most questions a supplier would otherwise ask by email, and it scales from a single entrance to a full building handover.

Day-one verification

The last section of the packet is the one the crew uses first. Day-one verification is five checks per door, run on the first unit installed in each zone before the rest of the zone is touched.

Each check takes minutes. Skipped, they resurface later as callbacks, rework and replacement claims, the expensive version of the same five questions.