MattCMI

Brief: Making Alterations to an existing project P07-203: Litchford Homes- after feed back from various estate agents

Project Task: I was given all the plans and elevations for the site - with only the plans having various pencil scribbles on. I was also given the feed back from 3 local estate agents (who’s comments where the sole reason of the redraw).

They varied from minor items like moving of window; to major re-changes like increasing the ‘family room’ width to 14feet which has implications though out the the whole building.

Approach Adopted / Solution applied: So to begin with I concentrated on Mr McCorkells pencil alteration to the drawings he gave me. After looking though all the notations on the drawings - i decided to start with what on the face of it was the simplest job… enlarging the ‘family room’.

Upon viewing all the altered plans etc there was a lot of work to do.

Problems Encountered / issues raised: The first problem i came across was how to implement a 14ft wide room. It was not just a matter of dragging parts of the building, but judging its impact on other room sizes, hall ways and head heights. It became obvious that however it was to just ‘pencil draw’ on the A3 - that in fact experience of doing this was invaluable. As i spent hours judging the impact of each change on the all the elements within its shell.

One impact i had on increasing the size of the ‘family room’ was that it impeded on the hall ways. Now this may not sound like much of an issue, but as i found out, that ground floor hall ways have to be designed to be a minimum of 1200mm wide (any smaller the wheel chair bound person will scrape the knuckles on radiators and door frames). I also had to move all the walls associated on that side of the building - this was because i had to maintain the CMI minimum 1400mm wide hallway, this moved the stairs thus creating much larger hallways upstairs than are actually needed. However, the estate agents wanted more space for bedroom 1 and larger en-suite bathroom - so in actual fact this worked out well.

NOTE: only ground floor hallways need a minimum width specified by PART M of the building regulations.

It took me awhile to come to some sort of conclusion and compromise. I thought that its better for the house to use all of the internal space rather having various random voids contained within the building. However I found it very hard to fill out all the space properly- then giving the work to my Mr McCorkell to check and alter showed how experience of this job is almost everything; as i was given my work back within 15min with a whole raft of changes and alterations.

Self Reflection on the experience: I feel it should be noted that some of my ideas for the internal space where taken on many where not. I felt that however wrong my decisions where shown to have been, i felt that these decisions helped my Boss Mr McCorkell in his decision making, because he can look at it and say ‘no - but…’ then change it. Saving him time and energy in doing the job himself.

I learned a lot on space management of internal spaces, but it showed that experience is very critical because i felt i took to long to do the job; because i may have over self anaylized my choices to much, but i did feel it was necessary for me to understand it and to justify my decisions in my head. I never had to justify my design of space, it be came clearer nearing the end of the second day that speed was the requirement. I am not sure this is fully appreciated at work as we are under pressure to perform but i feel it needs to be written down.

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