Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance!

Getting Things Started

Before jumping in with both feet, Mike and I decided to get plans together for the room. Lots of measurements were taken, and I took advantage of a being tired of my extraordinarily busy social life to put together plans of the existing shell. We used this as a basis to draw up ideas and sketch some layouts.

These were invaluable since we could print off as many of these as we wanted, and they were pre-dimensioned and to scale. We could also use this to draw in the different plans - electrical, plumbing, framing, electrical again, plumbing once more... and so on. I drew these up using Microsoft Visio, which was fairly easy to learn quickly, and is pre-loaded with lots of useful shapes including windows, plumbing fixtures, etc. That way, I could get layouts prototyped quickly on the computer, as well as print off the base image to draw on.



I've got one example of a very early proposed layout. At a certain point, of course, it was important to start building and see what shape the room wanted to take. This is a strange concept: the shape the room wants to take. I learned it from Mike, and was at first very dubious. The idea of the room telling me the next step to take really seemed foreign, but it was shocking how true it is - once a basic framework was up, it seemed very obvious how one idea or another was logical. I think of this as rapid prototyping - you can't decide whether or not a ceiling height feels low until you're standing under it, so these plans evolved rapidly as we started to build. So, for historical curiosity, check out an early idea I sketched out:



However, the one item that was key for planning was the plumbing for the bathroom. In the plans above, the shower was very much unworkable - it would have projected into the room a lot more than the drawing indicates. Similarly, the toilet was going to be in a strange place with some window visibility. We didn't realize much of this until after we started prototyping-building Taking some of these thoughts into account, Mike drew up proposed plumbing plans by hand that were more detailed and based on code. I know I have other and more close to current drawings, but these are the ones I have handy for now. When I get electronic copies of the other ones, I'll do a catch-up post to share them out.

Next Up!
The first photos of construction!