Once the block is cut and the formwork is up you can see the outline of the house. Check it against the site plan: the setbacks with a tape from the boundary pegs, and the orientation, because houses have been poured mirror-imaged. Look at the plumbing in the ground. Pipes should have fall towards the sewer point, be capped, and sit where the bathrooms are on the plan, not a metre off.

If it is a waffle pod slab you will see rows of polystyrene boxes with steel between them. The steel should sit on bar chairs, not on the ground or the pods, so it ends up in the middle of the concrete. Look for the edge beam and, on a sloping block, the drop edge beam on the low side. A vapour barrier, the black plastic, should be under everything with the joins taped.

A poured slab should be one plane, with a broom finish outside and a smooth finish inside. Sight along it. Bumps and hollows more than about 10mm over three metres will show up as bulkheads under kitchen cabinets and rocking tiles. Check the edges for honeycombing, which looks like gravel with no cement around it, and for the termite barrier detail where the slab edge meets the brickwork later.

The plumbing stubs should now stand up out of the concrete where the toilets, showers and sinks go. Match them to the plan. A shower waste 200mm off centre in a small ensuite means the shower screen does not fit, and moving it now means cutting concrete. Also find the shower recess: it should be set down 20 to 50mm below the main floor, or have a hob planned, so water stays in the shower.

Frame is where a house is right or wrong forever, and it is fully visible for about a week. Walls should be plumb, which you can check with a long level or a phone app on a few studs. Look at the stud spacing: 450mm centres is standard for load bearing walls, 600mm for some non load bearing ones. Noggings, the short horizontal pieces between studs, should be there at about mid height. Missing noggings mean wavy plaster and nothing to screw a towel rail into.

Check the frame against the plan with a tape. Room sizes, window openings, door openings. This is the last cheap moment to move a wall or widen a bathroom door. Look up at the trusses: they should be tied down with straps or brackets, not just nailed, and there should be bracing panels or steel straps running diagonally on the outside of the frame, because that is what stops the house racking in wind.

Look for the little things. Lintels over openings should be sized to the span, with a double stud either side. Bottom plates should sit on the slab with no gaps and be bolted or shot down. Where plumbing passes through a stud there should be a metal plate protecting it from the plasterer's screws later. And the frame should be dry: timber that has been rained on for weeks and still reads wet on a moisture meter should not be closed in.

Before the roof sheeting or tiles go on, sarking, the foil or membrane, should cover the roof frame with laps facing downhill. Under tiles it catches wind driven rain and dust. Once the roof is on, look at the flashings around every penetration: the flue, the vents, the skylight. Look at the valleys where two roof planes meet, and at any box gutter, which is the internal gutter that sits behind a parapet and is the single most common source of ceilings falling in ten years later.

Lock-up means windows in, external doors on, roof on. Check windows are square by opening and closing every one, and that they have been flashed at the head and sill. Look at the brickwork: mortar joints should be consistent, around 10mm, perpends roughly lined up, weep holes at the base of the wall every so often so the cavity drains, and the damp proof course visible as a line just above ground.

Between lock-up and plaster the plumber and electrician run everything through the frame. This is the rough-in, and it is your only chance to see it. Walk the electrical plan and count: every power point, light, switch, data point and TV point should have a cable and a bracket where the plan says. Stand in each room and ask yourself where the bed, the couch and the desk go, because moving a power point now is minutes and after plaster it is a patch and a paint.

Look at the water pipes. Hot and cold should be clipped, run with some sense, and pressure tested with a gauge left on the line. Insulation goes into the external walls now. It should fill the cavity without being crammed, with no gaps at the top of the wall or around windows, and it should not be pushed into the eaves where it blocks ventilation.

After plaster and before tiles the wet areas get waterproofed. It is a membrane painted onto the floor and up the walls, and it is the thing that fails in leaking showers across the country. Look for it to run across the whole shower floor and up the walls to at least 1800 in the shower, to cover the floor of the whole bathroom or at least a good margin out from the shower, and to turn up the wall at the perimeter. Look at the corners, the drain, and where the shower screen will sit. It should be one colour, no pinholes, and it should have been left to cure before anyone tiled over it.

Photograph it. Then ask for the waterproofing certificate, which the applicator signs. If the shower leaks in five years, the photos and the certificate are what the argument turns on.

Fixing is when the cabinets, doors, skirting, architraves and tiling go in. Now you are checking finish. Run a hand along the plaster in raking light from a window: bumps and screw pops show. Open every door and cupboard, check they close square and the gaps are even. Look at the tiles for lippage, where one tile sits higher than the next; a couple of millimetres is normal, a coin edge is not. Check the shower screen lines up with the set-down and the tile grout is full.

Look at the kitchen against the drawing: the fridge cavity width, the bench overhang, the gap between the rangehood and the cooktop, the alignment of drawer fronts. Look up at the cornice joins and down at the skirting mitres. None of this is structural and all of it is what you see every day.