I Review Georgia-Pacific Deliveries for a Living. This Is My 6-Step Checklist

I review material deliveries before they get installed—roughly 200 line items a month, working for a commercial construction company. In Q1 2024, I rejected seven deliveries. Every one would have caused rework if it had made it into a wall or a washroom. That's what this checklist is for.

Five minutes of verification on the dock is cheaper than five days of correction in the field. Use this when you're accepting a delivery or doing the last walkthrough before a client takes the keys. This is the checklist I actually run, not the one from the training manual.

Step 1: Read the stamp on Georgia-Pacific wood products before you trust the stack

A lot of our wall and roof assemblies start with Georgia-Pacific wood products: plywood, OSB, and panel goods. When a truck arrives, the pallet is shrink-wrapped, the top sheet looks clean, and the natural instinct is to sign and move on. Stop.

The grade stamp is not a label. It's a document. The APA mark (APA – The Engineered Wood Association) tells you the panel was certified, and the exposure rating plus span rating tell you where it can be installed. If your submittal requires an exterior-rated panel and the delivery is marked Exposure 1, that's a different product, no matter how identical it looks from the top of the stack.

Look, the driver isn't trying to trick you. But the driver is paid to deliver goods on time, not to interpret whether the material matches your spec. That part is on you.

After the stamp, put a pin meter on the bottom sheets, not just the one on top. The bottom panel is the one that picks up moisture from a damp trailer floor. I use 19 percent as my cutoff. Above that, I don't sign for the load until the supplier has been called.

Step 2: Inspect the edges, not just the face

Panel products fail from the edge first. The face can look brand new while the bottom sheet has a crushed corner or a soft edge hidden by the shrink-wrap.

A few years ago, a pallet of tile backer arrived with a tear in the wrapper at the bottom corner. The forklift operator said it was cosmetic. It wasn't. The face paper was cut and the core was exposed in exactly the spot that would sit closest to the floor. We caught it because I squatted down and looked at the pallet from its level, not from standing height. That low-level look catches more problems than any checklist item I have.

Run your hand along the bottom edge of the pallet. If you feel anything damp, crumbly, or sharp, open the wrap and look closer. It's worth the fifteen minutes before the driver leaves.

Step 3: Compare specialty materials to an approved sample—forged carbon fiber is the trap

Some materials will make you fail a good part if you don't know what you're looking at. Forged carbon fiber is my favorite example.

If you haven't handled forged carbon fiber, it looks wrong at first. The surface is choppy: strands of carbon are swirled through the resin instead of woven into a neat cloth pattern. Each panel varies. A quality inspector trained on painted finishes could easily reject the entire batch.

So I don't judge it by my memory of what carbon fiber should look like. I judge it against the approved sample. Then I look for actual defects: pinholes, fiber that isn't fully wetted by resin, soft clear-coat spots, and unsealed edges.

If a specialty material arrives and there's no approved sample available, stop the inspection and get one. Guessing is how good parts get rejected and bad parts get installed.

Step 4: Put an actual roll in the Georgia Pacific double toilet paper dispenser

Washroom hardware can look perfect on paper and fail in real use. That's why my washroom walkthrough includes a roll test.

I put a refill into every Georgia Pacific double toilet paper dispenser and close the cover. It sounds too simple. It caught a real problem last year: the facility contract specified jumbo rolls with a 3-inch core, but the double dispenser we installed was designed for standard-core rolls. The jumbo rolls wouldn't sit on the spindles, and the covers couldn't close. Nobody noticed, because nobody had ever put the actual roll into the actual unit.

Then check the mounting height. The 2010 ADA Standards (Section 604.7) put the paper outlet between 19 and 48 inches above the finished floor. I measure each unit even when it feels like overkill. Especially when it feels like overkill.

If the cover takes two hands to close, or the paper doesn't tear at the blade, fix it before the client sees it. One fixture complaint can undo a hundred small things done right.

Step 5: Schedule shower head cleaning—here's how to clean a shower head with vinegar

Nobody thinks about shower heads until the water pressure drops and the spray pattern looks like a sad fountain. Hard water scale is the reason. It is also easy to prevent.

If you manage showers in a gym, dorm, or locker room, here is how to clean a shower head with vinegar, no plumber required:

1. Fill a sturdy plastic bag with equal parts white vinegar and warm water.
2. Submerge the shower head in the bag, or wrap the bag around it and hold it in place with a rubber band.
3. Soak for 30–60 minutes. Heavy commercial scale may need two hours.
4. Scrub the nozzles with a stiff nylon brush or a wooden toothpick.
5. Run hot water for two minutes to flush out the dissolved scale.

One warning: vinegar is a mild acid. On bare aluminum or worn chrome, a long soak can damage the finish. Test the underside first, and don't let the bag soak overnight.

Why does this belong on a building materials checklist? Because a weak shower is a maintenance problem, not a fixture problem. If the fixture gets replaced because nobody cleaned it, you've spent $150 to solve a 50-cent problem.

Step 6: Put small parts like a canister purge valve on the schedule

Quality isn't only about what gets attached to a building. It's also about the trucks, lifts, and equipment that make the work happen.

We have a work van that developed a rough idle. We assumed it was normal age and scheduled a tune-up for the next month. Then the check-engine light came on. The diagnostic pointed to the canister purge valve, a small emissions part that routes fuel vapors into the engine. The replacement cost under $100. The rental car, the extra diagnostic time, and the reworked job schedule cost several times that.

The frustrating part is that the early symptom was there for two weeks. A rough idle sounds like a tune-up issue, so that's what we heard. It turned out to be a $100 part that would have taken 45 minutes to swap. If we'd run a scan when the symptom first appeared, we'd have been one hour and one cheap part away from normal operations.

Small parts fail early when they're ignored. Add them to the preventive schedule before the failure makes its own schedule.

Common mistakes when you use this checklist

This checklist is not a reason to reject materials at the dock. A small scratch on a panel that goes inside a wall is not a defect. A soft, wet edge is. Take a picture of anything you flag, with the delivery ticket in the frame, before the driver leaves.

And do not accept a substitute based on a verbal promise. If you didn't see it in the submittal, it isn't approved. Written documentation is how quality survives a Friday afternoon.

Finally, don't keep the checklist in your head. The point isn't to find reasons to say no. The point is to make sure the difference between what you ordered and what you installed never gets discovered after the warranty starts.