Getting Things Right

The past week has been stressful as we’ve tried to manage changes to the house plan.

You might remember that during our last site meeting, the project manager mentioned they needed to make some changes to the staircase. We thought he meant the stairs leading from the balcony to the backyard, but it’s actually the internal staircase they need to change. And the proposed changes do not affect the staircase so much as our main bathroom situated above it.

The initial house plans apparently did not include enough headroom above the stairs, and to solve this, the builder proposed eating into the bathroom. This created a kink in our previously flat wall, and left an awkward gap behind half of the bath. It felt like a lazy solution that gave no consideration to the spaces around it. Once we had gotten over our initial horror, we came up with an alternative solution, which the builder has accepted.

You can see our solution in the picture. The ledge behind the bath buys us the extra height for the staircase below, and keeps the rest of the wall in tact.

We’ve also noticed during recent meetings that the tradespeople have a more detailed plan of the house, and we’ve started noticing little errors on it. We got our hands on a copy of that detailed plan last week, and spent the weekend poring over it, checking every measurement. It showed up a handful of windows and doors that are not quite in the right place. Since the builder needs to change the plans anyway to deal with the staircase, it seemed like a good opportunity to check all the little details so that the changes can be made at the same time.

As stressful as it has been finding all of these problems, I’m glad we’ve found them now, before the building has really begun. At this stage the changes are on paper, and that seems much easier than making changes to the physical building later on.