6 month and 2 days after we signed the contract with ProHaus our house plans are finally here!
I really don’t think it’s normal for it to take this long, but here’s our story of why it did:
After our architect spent several hours talking about all of our wishes and seemed to be very inspired, it turned out he was not at all what we were looking for.
April 2nd we got the first drawing from him. I really thought it was a late April fools joke, but apparently it was not.
I wish I could show you a picture of the plans he drew, but I don’t want to risk him finding it, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
Here are just some of the best examples of what was wrong with it:
– There was a wall right in front of our winter garden (basically a big glass front). He said that was so no on could look in. I still fail to see the point of paying quite a lot for windows when I can’t look out of them….
– There was a wall right next to our dinner table. It turned out to be the wall that had the toilet pipes from the upstairs bathroom coming down. Might have been nice acoustics while eating dinner 😉
– Our kitchen island (with stove) and the rest of the kitchen (with the sink, oven, etc.) were basically in two different rooms. When I told him that wouldn’t work because I’d have to run back and forth while cooking, he said that’ll be fine for “it will keep me fit”.
– We wanted a pantry close to the kitchen. He put it on the other side of the hallway.
– We wanted a storage room for toys, the vacuum cleaner, etc. Just stuff you want to be out of the way. I kept checking his plan and couldn’t find the room until I saw that over our stairs (open stairs you can see through right in the living room) he wrote “Simply put your stuff under the stairs” – it literally said that.
– We didn’t have a door going into our bedroom. He though it was fine to just have us walk through the walk-in-closet. Every single time. Because when I go to bed or get up in the morning I always want to see the laundry I still have to put away…..
– We asked for a corner bathtub and a glass shower. Neither of which he was able to fit in.
– We asked for a small master bedroom and “bigger” kids rooms since the kids spend a lot more time in their rooms then we do in the bedroom. Our bedroom was about 10qm bigger then the biggest kids room.

And these are just the best ones there were. I honestly didn’t know where to start. When I called him and said we had to start over he said since we really want to start building we should “just take it like it is”, kind of like if I ordered spaghetti and the chef accidentally used macaroni.

Obviously we didn’t “just take it like that” and tried to convince him there were other ways to do it. He kept saying there was no other possible way to do our house since we have so many kids rooms.
So just for fun we send him our idea (and we know NOTHING about houses) and he actually admired that it was a lot better. Which is worrying. That guy has his own company. He should do better than a computer guy and a stay at home mom.
He then said he would just send our plan to the house company the only thing is that our living room is too big so he needs to put a wall through the whole thing, dividing it into two rooms. We obviously didn’t want that so we asked him if there was any other way to keep the upstairs up, without having a wall going through the entire room. About 5 times he said no there was not. Chris asked if a steel beam would do the job and he said “oh yeah,… now that you are mentioning it, we could do that too”. BUT, he mentioned it would be a LOT of extra costs. We told him to let us know how much and for now to just include it in the drawing. He then asked ME to draw it into the plan I had (made with a free online hobby program) , since I already had it all drawn out and he apparently didn’t fell like drawing it again.
Oh and the HUGE extra costs for the steel beam? – It was $100. I think we’ll spend that instead of having a wall going through the entire room….

We then complained to the company, because we lost so much time with this guy (February to June) and we didn’t want to pay him (- we didn’t.). Chris actually spent one entire day complaining and talking to bosses of bosses. After that, with in a couple of hours we got a new person assigned who was just amazing. She called several times a day to ask questions, give us tips or ideas and completely used our plan the way we wanted it and made it work.
Not everything is perfect (because we DO have a lot of rooms upstairs and we also had to take structural analysis and water pipes etc. into account) but we still believe it’s a heck of a lot better then having the kitchen in two rooms, a wall in front of your window or having to walk through your closet.

I didn’t want to blog about any of this, because for a while there we didn’t know if any of this would have a happy ending. So it’s much nicer to blog about it now that it’s over and show you the actual done plans.
Next step in a couple of weeks: “Bemusterung” where we go to the company and pick out tiles, bathtubs, showers, floors. The FUN stuff. – It’s about time 🙂

So, here’s the house:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We obviously know – like I said before – not everything is perfect. The walking could be wider, the kids rooms could be bigger, etc. But I think with the room we have we made the most out of it taking all the technical stuff into account. I though the different kids room sizes would be an issue, but turns out my kids are awesome and did it all on their own. Their easy and quick solution they told me after looking at the plans for two seconds: Lillian wants Kids room 1 because she is kid 1. Lavinia wants kids room 2 because she always has to go to the bathroom and wants to be closest to the bathroom (lol!), and Ryan gets room 3 because he will face the street and he is the one who likes to look at tractors all the time. Both sisters didn’t care about the size, but about their brother and what he likes to do. I love those three. And I am super excited about this house! Yay!