RANT: Architects & Contractors: Stop building dumb bathrooms!

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just got back from a week+ in Austin, TX. I encountered ANOTHER bathroom with a full-length mirror behind the john. GAH!

I also encountered a new flaw- a urinal placed so close to the side wall you couldn't stand square with it. You had to aim at a 45deg angle! WTF? Was this planned by some man-hating contractor?

 

[Crazy Jerome]

There's a reason why I designed my current house, and only took it to the architect for the final plans/structural review (and all he did was tweak a few window placements and find a way to not need a beam, so it was all good).

But I don't think it is the architects that are causing all this. You've got people trying so hard to handle disabilities that they completely forget common sense (and probably manage to frustrate those with disabilities anyway). You've got people with no sense of how plumbing actually works. But I think the hidden villains in the USA are the "home designers". You know, those folks that are wannabee architects but are are more, er, "artistically" inclined than otherwise. The people that used to be satisfied to be interior decorators, where all they could really do was waste money.

My wife and I toured a subdivision once where most of the houses had this closet laundry room opposite the master bath--the idea being that you've got these more or less "starter homes" with everything is convenient. You wash the linens, you dry the linens, and then you stack them on the nice little shelf in the master bath.

Except the designer was so in love with privacy that she put the linen closet in the same cubby with the toliet, which then had its own door. And the toliet cubby was near the bath entrace, which was directly opposite the laundry room closet, in a 25 inch-wide hall. (I always carried a tape measure when touring houses, for just such reasons.). Upshot was that to get towels from the dryer to the linen closet, you had to open and then close four consecutive doors. There wasn't room for the doors to be open without closing the next.

You'll note that this meant if anyone happened to be doing laundry, you had to open and close three doors to pee ... And when you closed that door to the toliet, there was barely room to sit, worse than the worst public stall I've ever seen. But if you didn't close it, you blocked all access to the bathroom for the spouse. It was like doing one of those 4x4 grid image plastic puzzles.

I asked the real estate agent why they had replicated this after the first house, since this occurred in the "show house" as well, and why the person responsible had not been fired. She just blinked at me. I guess she had gone numb.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Oh, I'm sure there are contractors at fault for some of these...as well as future owners who keep putting in change orders or who answer contractors' questions without looking at the plans first.

We did that in our house once, but fortunately, it just involved placement of a particular kind of jack and choice of tiles in a bathroom. The results were less than good, but livable, though the tile choice has since been changed in a remodel.

Our house was built from the ground up from a design that was standard to the nationally known homebuilder working the neighborhood. Said standard design included a 6' x 6' picture window w/standard glass over the hot-tub in the master bathroom...which faces the street. Changing that to glass brick was an upgrade.

J'accuse...ARCHITECT!

 

[Scott DeWar]

.as well as future owners who keep putting in change orders or who answer contractors' questions without looking at the plans first.

As an electrician , I usually dont have too much of a problem with change orders, but when a cutomer plans on simple 2 bulb fiztures that take an hour to do the whole house to 5 different cieling fans that all have a different way to install and taking from 45 minutyes to 2 1/2 hour to install, that gets to be a bit of a strain. My boss had to put in a seprate bill for the light change to cieling fans because it went way over the bid and the light fixtures were bidded specific as well.

This kind of change happens way more often then you may want to hear about.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

In our case, we were building the house, and we were asked about placement of a jack. We said "put it there" without looking at the plans. The contractor asked "Are you sure?" and we said "Yes."

...which put it in a corner fairly close to an attic door. This meant tight access, and that my home office arrangement had to be shifted 90deg.

With the bathroom tile, we made an analogous mistake, not realizing that the room in question directly opened into a space with an entirely different tile that was adjacent to a room with wood flooring AND next to a room that was carpeted. The effect was...a little jarring.

Now, post renovation, the bathroom, space and formerly carpeted room all share the same tile. MUCH nicer visual flow.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

OK, this wasn't so much design idiocy as a simple, unintended consequence. I've griped about mirrors behind toilets, but I found one that wasn't supposed to be there.

The bathroom looked nice & normal, and its mirror was over the sink. It also had a toilet-seat cover dispenser over the toilet.

A chrome toilet-seat cover dispenser...very clean and highly polished.

The effect was just like a funhouse mirror- I HAD to laugh!