Saving Inner Space

We have now gotten rid of the post in the middle of the bedroom, and the catwalk across the small atrium. (They're crossed out in the plan above; the sea side is at the top.) Both had been bothering me for some time—the post really intruded into the space where one would walk through the room, and the catwalk seemed awfully solid and heavy for something that would take up about a third of the atrium opening, blocking a lot of the light.

I had dropped by Azby Brown's art lab for a discussion about his book, Just Enough, and I showed him the plans for the house. An architect and professor, he zoomed in on both as problems almost immediately (“students lose points for something like the post,” he said), which convinced me to do something about it. When I brought up finding a way to dispose of the post at our meeting that night, T, the architect, immediately agreed, and chose to use a larger beam across the room to hold up the riser to the roof. He also admitted the catwalk was an irritation, but that he thought we’d need a way to clean and open the windows. He’s right, of course, but I’ll get a very tall ladder to clean them, and we can open them by reaching out over the atrium.

And with that, our final plans should be done on the 26th, ready to be sent out for permits. I'm still concerned about air flow and window placement, but I hope we can straighten the few small points out as we go. We're a month behind schedule, and we haven't even had one hammer on the premises other than my own. They say the permits will take a month at most, which gets us very close to Golden Week, the string of holidays at the end of April which will add up to eight days this year. I'd hate to see them tear the place down, only to have the empty plot sit there over the holidays, while we try to find something to do elsewhere.