Living Room, Dining Room, Bedroom, Oops!

When our kids were little, there was a board book that would hit their little toddler funny bones. It was called Red Hat Green Hat by Sandra Boynton. Here’s the cover:

The plot is that everyone wears an article of clothing in a different color, but the turkey always gets it wrong. Like so:

Well we’ve had a few oops things during framing, so this book came to my mind.

The first was this oops:

The pipe for the toilet is just a wee bit off center here. My better half cracked, “How did they know we were right handed?” Oh. My. That’s really putting the urg in ergonomics, isn’t it?

Then when the architects came to visit, they noticed this oops:

Those dormers look pretty good, but they are not quite as drawn on the plans. The framers thought this would be “mucho better.” However, the little rooflets are meant to sit right down on the tops of the windows,

more like this:

These are still higher than drawn, but they are a happy compromise.

From the inside you can see that they sit right down on top of the header. They don’t offer quite as much head room inside this way, but they look better from the outside. The tall ones didn’t really suit the house.

The next oops was on the stairs.

They needed two more stairs to get from the main floor to the basement. Because of the way the floor joists and such were configured, they decided to split the landing to get the extra two steps like this:

Instead of having landings like the ones from the main floor to upstairs that are square like this:

I wasn’t a fan of the split landing, especially when the entry to the stairs down looks like this:

To me there is all kinds of space to put two steps in the area here. So, they are putting the extra two steps in the beginning area here and reworking the landings to be square. It’s hip to be square, after all.

This doesn’t really count as an oops, but here it is anyway.

Darling daughter’s bedroom and bathroom are under the eaves of two intersecting rooflines. So, she ended up with all of this wasted space under the eaves.

Since her room is the smallest, we just couldn’t have that. Plus it was just too much fun to dream up ways to use the space. The space you see above is on the right below.

Builder Gary and I decided that we could tuck a built in desk right into that spot.

Here it is with the rafters tucked away to make room for a desk.

While we were at it, we recaptured this space in her closet. It is just the right height for hanging clothes.

Another oops that came to light when Denise and Justeen were visiting was the roofline that met the wall in the stair tower. I commented that I wasn’t sure what that was all about, since the water (or icicles) would pour into the upstairs. Denise looked at me with a straight face and told me that was my water feature.

Well, if you can’t fix it, feature it….

It is kind of pretty to have icicles forming down into your family room.

But seriously, Denise went on to explain that there was meant to be a “cricket” that would connect the two roof lines and divert the water away from wall and down to the gutters. The cricket has since been constructed.

All I can say is

“Jiminy Cricket…”

All’s well that ends well.