What happens when we go away

Returning after over three weeks away, we were excited to go and look around the build site. We didn't expect much of interest to have happened while we were gone - just a bunch more boring stuff going in. Still, it was nice to walk the site and see all those wires, vents, pipes and cables. 

Then something unexpected caught Ash's eye. 'Are these windows smaller?' he asked. 'I hope not,' I said. Not just because we liked them the size they were, but also because the windows are already in production and it's way too late to change them. But something was definitely up.

This is the size of the window when we left at the end of July: 

This is the guest room - the windows in the bathroom and in Penelope's room are the same size.

This is what we returned home to in late August:

Different, isn't it? And the windows in bathroom and Penelope's room had also moved. Which is odd because no-one called us to suggest moving any windows around. A quick 'um what happened to the windows?' text to our GC solved the mystery.

It turns out they are the same size, but just closer to the floor. Along with all those vents and pipes come 'soffits', the boxing in that happens to hide the water, heat, and air. Sadly for our guests, that guest-room ceiling needs to accommodate quite a lot of ugly but essential pipes. So in our absence, the builder decided to drop down the ceiling all around the perimeter, in order to house all that stuff. Then to make that work he had to drop the window a foot. And to make that not look weird he had to drop the next two windows that are lined up on that wall a foot too.

As a result we had three rooms in a row which all had weirdly low windows. Including one that is over (well, now it would be beside) a bathtub, and one that has a window seat in it. Not good candidates for weirdly low window locations! 

No harm, no foul. The windows are going to be moved back up. The guest room will have a slightly odd u-shaped soffit as a result. A small price to pay for three rooms with windows that make sense, we think. All of which makes me think how glad I am that we are close enough to the site to check in regularly - and that we probably shouldn't go away for three weeks again... you never know what decisions might be made in our absence.