[rant-ette] Detail oriented design

[puntloos]

Wife and me are both computer engineers/product guys, and we're struggling to deal with the handwaviness of, well, most builder types we deal with. Our builder is already way below average in attentin to detail so no complaints about them, but especially many subcontractors (e.g. the fireplace thing) are happy to handwave things along - "it will be fine....", and I heard a story from @joth where a shower was fully relocated across the bathroom on the day. His situation came by through an unexpected retrofit point, so sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, but if you start shuffling things around massively then all these "will this clash with that" mostly goes out of the window.. 

 

Realise that in general there's truth to it will be fine but for example we are now in a to-and-fro with a bathroom team where we, for example, say "well, the current hinged shower door size is 750, so it would hit this 550 vanity unit on the other side when fully opened. So let's reduce it to 650."

 

And what happens is:

- They update the door, but then they find out that the shower cabin they selected doesn't have that size+width and they change the cabin but the cabin needs a different xyz and then they move the rear wall and tadaa.. the shower now overlaps with the bath, which works great on paper, not so great with actual baths and glass panels.

So then we go 'hey this bath clashes with the shower wall'

- And then they update this and move that and move the vanity and oh here's a sliding door instead! 

 

I suppose my main complaint is that suppliers/advisors helpfully move all kinds of things around without telling us, and sometimes without checking knock-on effects.

- Yes, the shower wall bath clash story is real.

 

And importantly: They don't tell us which clever things they thought of and which they haven't

- Ex: putting a shower head on a side wall means you can more easily lift and spread your arms while facing sideways, where if the shower head is mounted on the rear wall you have less arm space.

 

How do you all navigate the challenge of "thinking of everything"? We multiple times tried to hire an "expert" but most of them come up with a few clever things they can point out but nobody so far convinced us they truly can be trusted to think of most important things.. Halp?

 

 

 

 

[Alan Ambrose]

Suggest you:

 

+ learn about everything you can and try to spot all the problems you can up front,

+ if you can't/don't want to do that, then you need a trusted builder / handyman to do that work for you,

+ when that person is paid, they become a 'clerk of works',

+ monitor all trades closely, especially at the planning stage, unless you've used them before and know their work to be good,

+ be aware that some mistakes will always be made, but the objective is to spot the big/expensive issues up front and manage around them,

 

This is the 'risk management' part of project management. Same skills as used in the tech business. I'm naturally a pessimist and assume everything can/will go wrong, so I'm a good project manager