Don't Laugh: Renovation Mistakes Better Planning Would Have Avoided

Designing a home takes thousands of details into account, and that's no exaggeration. Whether it's electrics, plumbing, tiling — or more importantly the combination of all of the above — everything needs to be in sync.

Kitchens

Here's a kitchen someone sent in. Do you see anything amiss?

The top left corner unit was made redundant, with no way to access it, because the air conditioning unit sits directly in front of it. She had to cut the door on the left and deem the top part unusable, losing valuable storage.

How did it happen? She used a kitchen company that was only considering the kitchen and had no idea about the electrics happening in the rest of the house. The kitchen company and the AC installer each blamed the other for the oversight.

Had she had a designer overseeing it, this could have been avoided.

Bathrooms

Just a few centimetres again — a miscalculation where the bathroom door bangs into the radiator. Tragic? No. But a shame, because it could have been avoided with better planning.

And then the taps. These people each bought the wrong tap because they didn't take the necessary factors into account:

• Distance from tap to the edge of the sink
• Size of the sink
• Height of the tap
• Distance of the spout from the handle

What could have helped? Better planning.

Plan, plan, plan

I'm always repeating myself on this underlying principle of home renovation: be ahead of the game, and plan down to the last detail.

Recently a dental clinic reached out to me — the waiting room and the whole clinic just didn't look right and was missing something. I visited this high-end location, and it was missing something. The walls and floors were all tiled in the same boring tile; it looked like a bathroom. It was evident that no thought or planning had been invested in the space, although plenty of money had. And now that everything is tiled, pulling electricity or making any changes is so much harder.

And on workmanship

Look at this cut-and-paste job around a pillar. For your information, there are mouldings called Flexi — the name says it all — which can be wrapped around a pillar far more proficiently than that.

So yes: before embarking on any renovation, regardless of scale, proper planning is required.