A house extension is exciting. It can be life-changing and a huge investment. Yet without one simple tool it can go horribly wrong...
I can’t tell you the number of times in my job that I have been to see clients who, on the cusp of a major renovation, or even halfway through it, have never printed their plans out to scale, or actually measured what they are getting or what will fit. They will wave vaguely at an area and say ‘we are going to have a corner sofa there’ and I then have to explain that no, they aren’t as their sofa won’t fit there. How does this happen?
All too often, people are literally building on trust. Trust that what they see on plans that they have pored over on their laptop, will be what they end up with. After all, if it says ‘snug’ and shows a sofa, then surely that is what they are getting?
What people don’t realise is that often the furniture that is shown on a plan is either not to scale, or is scaled, but at a size that isn’t realistic or possible. Your architect is not responsible for this. His or her job is to give you an idea of the rooms you will get and how you might furnish them, but people take what they see on the plans for gospel. If they see a corner sofa, they just think ‘yippee, I will finally have a corner sofa in here’, but they never measure the plans to discover that the corner sofa they are looking at is one drawn for Lilliputians.
Quick example for you – a sofa, which in reality is about a metre deep, is all too often shown at 70cms deep on plans (that’s a large bench people, not a sofa!) and an armchair, which is usually around 75cms x 75cms for a neatish chair, will show as 60cms x 60cms. This isn’t wilful sabotage by your architect. It’s a result of the software they use which has presized images of furniture that they slot into the plans for you.
It’s not helped by the fact that we tend to subconsciously edit what we see on a screen. It’s a known fact that we process the information on a computer screen very differently from how we do on paper. We tend to see what we expect to see, rather than what is actually there, and building jobs are no exception.
Before you panic, don’t worry – these are things that can be solved before you start. You just have to spot the potential problems. So, how do you do that? Well, you need to know what you are getting and that leads us to the best investment you can make in a building job and probably the cheapest.
It is a scale ruler and access to a printer.
So, get your plans printed (at a scale of 1:50), get out that scale ruler, and start measuring. You can buy a scale ruler on amazon for under £5 and you can email your plans to an online company who will print them and send them out in the post, or get your architect to print them out for you. It’s a tiny expenditure that will save you stress, time and money and mean you understand what you are getting, and can alter it if you need to before you start work. Think of it as ‘try before you buy’.
So please, take the time to find out if the sofa you have ordered will actually fit. That the shower in your new bathroom is a good size. That there is enough room in your new utility for coats and the hoover and the dogbed? Enough wall space in your new kitchen for the breakfast cupboard you long for and the high level ovens.
It’s your house. Take control of the detail now, before you start work. Don’t plan on sorting these things out as the build moves forwards. Understanding the space and how you can use it means you will put radiators in the right places, electrics where you need them, and have a building job that takes less time and is less likely to go over budget.
So, buy that scale ruler and print those plans out. It’s your home. Make sure you are getting what you want.
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