I am a Civil Engineer

For those who don’t know it already, I am an Engineer, a Civil Engineer to be precise. I chose this path to build tangible things, or so I thought. For the past 10 years I have been working on huge Engineering projects, mostly on the construction of power-plants and railways in France and abroad. However, it hasn’t given me the satisfaction I thought I would get by working in this kind of environment (mostly because I was working remotely from an office). On the contrary, working on much smaller scale projects during my personal time has always succeeded in giving some sense of achievement.

So last week my husband and I started renovating a small apartment because why not, the employment market is slow and traveling in our free time is not an option.

The plan is to renovate it and lease it in the shortest time possible while doing as much work as we can by ourselves. As my husband has a lot of holidays available for not taking many in the past year (only 2 weeks when our daughter was born) he has mostly been working in it and I have been supporting him, taking pictures and most importantly preparing 3D sketches for the future rooms layout.

In just 2 days he has completely dissembled the kitchen and the bathroom and evacuated all the remainings to the local waste collection site. Sometimes he really impresses me!

After tearing everything down and giving me all useful measures, I started modeling the rooms with online free tools (the IKEA ones are very easy to use and give a good perspective on the average furniture dimensions). The kitchen used to be a very long room with 2 windows which led to a very small bathroom with no windows at the right end of it (the overall shape is an inverted L). I initially modeled the rooms with the same layout to keep the amazing and luminous kitchen, but we soon agreed that, although there would be more work needed, it made little sense to rebuild it that way.

I therefore designed a smaller kitchen but a bigger bathroom which would now both include one window. It also allowed space for a bathtub, which is not easy to get in small flats!