Plans
The house construction project seems to be well on its way. Brad and I found each other congenial, and he started on Monday with renewed enthusiasm for the project, finally liberated from an oppressive and opinionated boss.
What changed? Well, the story he tells is quite sad: the former owners seem to have lured him into construction, just to run out of money about a year ago. As he saw no more money coming out of the owners, he slowly started killing the project and moved on to other, better things.
At the same time, he disagreed with the owners a lot: about methodology, materials, looks.
Enter Marco, and he seems to be relieved. As I mentioned I was not going to be around all the time, he was sincerely disappointed, and he started replying to all my phone calls ever since the project started. That’s actually both surprising and wonderful.
What did we do? Well, on Monday we cleared the floor and got ready for subflooring. That took most of the week, but on Friday the trio tackled the main lanai on the makai side. Went very well (need pictures). On Tuesday I had to go to the Kona side, so the project was on hold from my perspective. On Wednesday, we looked at the subfloored and cleaned house, and we started drawing some changes to the plans. Minor changes, actually, but they will make all the difference.
- The utility room is going to become a bedroom with external access
- The small bedroom is going to be enlarged slightly and will become a den/family room
- The master bedroom is going to be reduced to a regular (though oversized) bedroom
- The master bedroom closet shrinks correspondingly
- The master bathroom is somewhat larger
- Some routing of walls changes to accommodate local custom
- A laundry chute in the kitchen replaces the refrigerator area
- The kitchen grows
- We completely changed the staircase from linear to a U shape – this will abut the den and create a stairwell for art display
- We re-routed the outdoor stairs to the basement to go straight into the basement
All in all, great changes!