We thought this looked like...well, YOU know!
This looked much better...don't you think?
Like most people who build houses we went wildly over our budget with change orders. I'll admit I was the one responsible most of the time, but not everyone has the ability to look at blueprints and see things that, after all, won't work.
The first one resulted from some computer software designed to help with furniture arrangement. Once I input the dimensions of our bedroom and our king sized bed I could see the room was going to be too small. Luckily I discovered this before the foundation went in so it wasn't a big deal. We just added an extra two feet to the south wall.
Next, when we arrived on one of our weekly visits after the house was being framed I saw two blank walls that definitely needed windows, one in the kitchen and one in my office. That wasn't too bad. All they had to do was cut through the plywood and studs and frame a window. Still, it was extra.
A near catastrophe was the deck. The carpenter happened to be there working on the Sunday we visited, and immediately both of us could see the edge of the deck was too close to the French doors off the family room. If someone were to have just a little too much wine when he/she stepped out onto the deck, well, it wasn't like falling into the sound or anything that drastic, but it wouldn't have been funny. So we told the carpenter how we wanted it changed and brought down Sarah's wrath.
She called, and in no uncertain terms without raising her voice, she told me she was person we'd hired to build our house and that any changes we wanted to make would have to go to her first. She was right, of course, but I felt silly being scolded like a child and insisted "well, we were there, Sarah, and we just didn't want him going any further until the mistake was corrected." She didn't buy it and I learned my lesson.
The really major catastrophe was the chimney in David's den at the front of the house. We drove up the day they had cut through the roof and installed the exhaust from the propane fireplace. We both gasped and said in unison, "Oh, no!" The chimney looked for all the world like a phallic symbol. We called Sarah and she took matters into her own hands and had it moved back where it became less prominent. It didn't matter that no one else saw it that way.
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