From Perfectionist to That’ll Do!! The concluding part of one woman’s experience

In my mind, the roof is probably the most important part of a house. It affects the way a house looks and also how it withstands hurricane winds. A house I lived in previously had survived hurricanes Hugo, Louise, Bertha and Marilyn without a problem, but when George came along it turned up its toes. The wind directions were different and lifted off a section of the roof on the northern side before the eye of the storm, then took off the southern side when the wind direction reversed. But when an identical house just down the road survived unscathed it was puzzling until the owner explained the simple alteration that had been made to the roof design. (A blow-by-blow account of surviving a hurricane when the roof disappears is available on request…it is clearly etched in my memory and involves a bike helmet and a bottle of rum!)

In the house building process, plenty of time is focused on the floor plan; working out where the rooms will be, what size works best in the space available, where the shower, vanity and toilet fit into the bathroom, identifying storage spaces (make sure you have enough!), choosing tiles for the floors, choosing window styles and choosing colours. But when it comes down to deciding on the best roof design, it seems to be left to the creatures of the air. Don’t believe me? Just spend some time driving around checking out roofs. The laws of aerodynamics mean that certain angles will aid in ‘lift off’; you’ve seen airplane wings, make sure your roof won’t have the same tendency.

I knew what roof design I wanted but didn’t know whether my floor design would fit with it. It didn’t. Rooms had to move and change shape before the roof could fit with the house and the big bonus of that was more closet space! What more could you want! And the end result…looks good and, to be honest, I really don’t want to have to test its stickability properties.

Was it a figment of my imagination that my builder told me that he could build my house in 6 months? Wishful thinking, a positive attitude, telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, or just plain unrealistic? Friends advised me to double the building cost quoted and double the time to build…good advice, unless you have a contract with clauses covering cost and building time. I didn’t!

But it’s tough on the builder when building supplies run low. Mine checked the plans for the sizes and number of windows required; unfortunately they weren’t all available in the style I requested. His solution was to only worry about the size and not the style. My solution was to wait for the missing sizes in the style I wanted to arrive. So when you’re driving around checking out the roofs, spare a glance at the windows…you’ll soon see what I mean.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 12:21 pm and is filed under lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.