I came home from work to find the plumber had been and left the site looking a bit like an abstract forest art installation in PVC. Because we are having a waffle pod slab which floats on top of the ground rather than in it the pipes have to be long enough to get up through the floor which in this case is about half a meter up.
With the house pad prepared, string lines up and plumbing in you can start to get an idea of the size and spaces in the house when walking around. As is always the case in my experience a house at the slab stage looks tiny for some reason. When the timber framing is up it will look huge, when the roof is on and external walls are up it will look tiny again and finally when the internal plaster walls are up it will look big again.
Why…..well…..with the slab I have no idea but with the others my theory is that it is to do with the amount of light. At timber framing it is open and airy borrowing space and views beyond the frames which only really trace the edges of the building. With the roof on and external walls up it is often quite dark inside due to darker, matt materials sucking the light out of the space. By the time you put the light coloured internal plasterboard up it bounces the light around and it feels much more open again. Sigh of relief.
When I was previously working in architecture I had been through this process with clients on their houses. It would sometimes worry them and privately make me as the designer a little nervous. However at the end of the day “you have to trust your drawings” if it works on paper, touch wood, so far it has worked in real life.
My wife, known for her sarcasm, declared “we are going to be living on a postage stamp”. When I let her know that it will in fact be twice the size of out last home, all of a sudden we were “living on two postage stamps”. At least two stamps would get us international which is entirely appropriate for the windows we hope to use but that’s for another day.