Personal Renovation Project, 2022
I had the chance to renovate my apartment in Rotterdam, dating back to 1933. The first thing I did was to make a general proposal to determine the changes that can be done in the apartment. Opening a wall between the dining room and kitchen could create a nice connection within the building. But since the wall was one of the main structural walls, it had to be calculated by a structural engineer. This process has been done by finding and investigating the original drawings of the building, sending the new proposals, and defining the idea behind it. Meanwhile, some drawings were made to be shown to the kitchen company as a proposal for the new design. I did some other modifications to the floor plan in relation to the bathroom and toilet space. The extra toilet on the second floor and changing the location of the main elements in the bathroom and toilet needed special supervision and criteria that could be smoothly communicated through the drawings.
After concluding the possible changes, the construction process was started under my supervision. I visited the building almost every day and was constantly in contact with the people who were working there. Since the building was old, there were always unexpected challenges during the execution phase. As an example, one of the challenges was how to align all the joints in the bathroom while having tilted walls due to the age of the building. Therefore by placing a profile and starting the first row of the tiles from the middle of the wall, we could almost solve this problem. Another challenge was about hiding the pipes inside the building. By removing the wall between the dining room and the kitchen we had the possibility to move all the pipes from the floor.