Well I just had twenty five feet of wall painted the wrong accent color, brown instead of red. Put the wrong designation in the schedule, on a project with a lot of different paint colors. Great thing is no one noticed except me and then I was the one who pointed it out in front of everyone because the painters have screwed up so much I thought for sure it had to be them again (yes it really has been them this is my first and only mistake). It works out though because the owner a city loves the color painted wrong.
Did here about someone though back in the days of paint having just numbers not names putting down the wrong room, causing a whole auditorium to be painted violet. They had to pay to have it painted.
No I am not an interior designer I just thought these mistakes were more light hearted than the beam that the engineer had put the 24" channel on in front of a glass curtain wall system for wind and did not tell anyone, solution just tear it off we really did not need it anyway.
About three months into my career, I was working on a small residential project that underwent several iterations. We were in a rush to get the CDs out and in my haste, I forgot to update the window schedule, so the contractor ended up ordering all the wrong window sizes. I'm one for admitting mistakes, but I always feel that my boss was partially responsible because he never bothered to look over the drawings before they went out. He just stamped them without looking them over, which is when I decided I had to leave that office.
I worked for a firm that wasn't exactly sued over the wrong paint color but did pay dearly for it. The responsible architect chose a "white" paint that seemed appropriate under the lighting conditions inside the office. But when seen outside under direct sunlight had a strong pinkish hue, which was greatly disturbing to the owner. The office took responsibility and ponied up the $30,000 to fix the error...it was a lot of pink.
Yikes, that sucks walldrug. Thankfully, our specifications call for an on-site mock-up prior to the sub-contractor purchasing the paint - I'm not sure if it's part of MasterSpec or if our spec writer threw that in.
we're going to try to leave the pvc sewer line below that footing. key will be determining that a 4" sch40 pvc can sustain 750psf crush load. from what i've been able to learn, it may actually be designed to resist 1500 psf. that would be great.
if not, we gotta tell them to remove all the rebar that's already been set and tied, dig out the 12" of #57s, and remove and backfill the sewer trench, then reset the line about 18" over to one side.
we are designing a 4-building compound in wyoming, which will serve as our client's ski-house. there is an existing log home which had several additions when we did the as-built drawings (which have sinse been demolished). as it was the only thing existing to remain more or less in place (but with several older additions to be demolished) it was used as a datum to square up the new constructions. there was also an existing garage, which was picked up and moved to be parallel with the house, ~100 feet away. the buildings essentially form a large rectangle around a courtyard, and three of them (garage and main house with a new guest house in between) are connected by a long, flat-roofed open air structure, which was to be one of the significant architectural features of the project, creating a long line of sight from the garage to the guest house, and ending centered on one of the main house front doors. the fourth is fully connected to the existing house on the other side of the courtyard, essentially making them one structure. this is not to pass the buck onto the contractor but he needed to have the garage moved first so he could keep his crew moving to pour the foundations last fall, so the garage was poured prior to any of the other construction or demo. however, in laying out the other new buildings and additions, relative to the house and the newly moved garage, it was discovered that the garage is 1 degree out of square with the house, which means the south walls of each building to be connected by the canopy thing are three feet off, and we've lost a major line of site between all three buildings. apparently the main house was significantly out of square, but it was impossible for the surveyors who staked the foundation to be able to notice this, as the side of the house that faces the garage had a significant old addition which hadn't been demolished yet at the time they laid it out.
I accidentally put dimension strings on room labels. The line weight they used in CAD for these label borders looked exactly like the line weights for partitions so I was confused. My PM looked at me with a blank stare and asked if I had gotten enough sleep.
yeesh bossman, that sounds like you have very few options to fix it... and the "blame" can be shared / denied equally by everyone on the project, meaning hopefully everyone can kick in together to solve this issue. What are you going to do?
leave it. our designer talked the client into it, that it is not "bad" but that you see the corner logs of the garage at the end of the sight-line, there is a kind of serendipity to how the canopy now "meanders" around the spaces a bit, and that it adds character to the project. several radical options were seriously considered though, including tear out and re-pour the guest house footings, or up root the garage, move it, destroy the new foundation, and re-pour it. from a value engineering perspective, these options defy the laws of common sense. it's just architecture. it will still be a beautiful project, not really better or worse but just different. mistakes to me are now inevitable, and more a matter of when than if. a good designer can take advantage of these things and incorporate them into the project, in the same way he takes advantage of the little serendipitous "accidents" which occur during the design process.
yep, i find myself thinking those same kinds of thoughts almost all the time nowadays about random mistakes like that. they're not even really mistakes... just quirks that ended up happening during construction. That's how I feel on the GOOD days. On the bad days, I'm still pissed... especially if it was a truly easily avoidable error, or easily fixable, or worst yet due to contractor negligence. ugh!
Another time I also accidentally left fire rating around an ADA toilet that was converted from a VRC Lift. The layer was just turned off but when we were presenting the new layout to a client that was the first thing that popped up.
She just looked up at us and was like "why would you need to fire rate an ADA toilet." It was actually pretty hilarious.
I can get pissed at contractors who make mistakes out of laziness and negligence. I make mistakes, but not out of laziness -- usually out of the opposite : being overworked and overtired. It galls me to no end to arrive on-site to a construction site where the "super" refuses to walk around the jobsite or even to leave his air-conditioned trailer, takes every Friday off to golf, leaves after exact union hours without staying one minute late to deal with anything at all (despite being way behind on his own schedule), and THEN, throws up his hands when mistakes on the job come up in discussion and either points the finger at me ("if you had gotten me that sketch earlier... my guys had already done the work!" <--- this while the actual timestamps of the sent sketch directly contradicted him) or pushes the client to pay for the fix. Or worse yet, convinces the client "it's not that bad anyway, the architect is just arrogant and has to have it the way he wants it, it's actually better the way i did it but the architect doesn't know any better... you understand right, har har har, those architects..." and the client comes back to me and tells me i am wasting his money by trying to fix the mistake and to let the contractor "do his job" and that i'm arrogant and he's fine with whatever it looks like, he doesn't even know why he pays for an architect anyway.
yeah the worst is when the client lives at the job site, such as a renovation, and the contractor conspires with them. most of the contractors i work with like architecture, which is why they work on more high end "architectural" residential projects, and are more or less pretty sensitive to what we want. luckily, most of our clients are patrons of architecture as well, and don't like people talking them around doing things they've already paid us to design.
this thread makes me feel better about myself...
Earlier this year I was reviewing the shop drawings for an escalator and couldn't figure out how long the thing was actually going to be. The termination detail at the bottom was quite a bit different than our basis of design. Eventually I decided it was probably ok, since the contractor had submitted it. Turned out the escalator was 12" longer than the space we had allotted for it and the contractor had to pour a new concrete wall right next to the existing foundation wall to support it. Fortunately it was all done at their cost.
When I was an office boy in Bean Town one of my jobs was to do some of the filing in the receptionist area. We had two receptionist one was older and single, quiet as a mouse, the other was the product of all girls schools including college. So anyhow we have these fire proof four door files and I with my hands full pull on the top drawer which opens a bit quicker than I would have liked striking me in the chest and knocking me off balance so backward I go with my hands coming back to help catch myself from the fall but all I caught was the back bottom side of the young receptionist who upon having my hands smacking her on the butt lets out a bloody murder scream which brings all of the partners and the business manager running. You can only image the flush of my face as I was all of 19
years old at the time.
i built a portfolio case wrong.... it was a for a client.... it was during the winter time and when i delivered it, i slipped on some ice and busted my ass on the sidewalk. i laid there for about a minute and thought i blew my bad knee out again. well, i managed to deliver it and i get an email stating it was too big....wtf..... so i flet like an ass and built a new one that was a bit better.
on the flip side. i have saved a few asses from issues not only in the field but also in the shop..... 1 time when i was contracting at this other model shop, we had an elevation that as wrong and missing some windows... the model had to be shipped in the morning and it was the late the night before.... instead of trying to take off the whole elevation which was about 24x24 just to toss in a row of windows, i managed to take a knife and cut through a score line and snap of the piece and then run that section in the laser to cut the windows. the entire elevation would have broke if we tried to take it off.....
on the job site i seen my ex-brother in law take a jigsaw to his pinky figure and cut half way through.... with a rough-wood blade on high speed.
I hate mistakes on my jobs made before I started but am now in charge of and left defending (if possible)...
I was given an old project about to go into construction when I started my job. As the project has been in planning and design for over FIVE years I figured the major things had already been covered, like elevator and bathroom code??..NOPE!!! Commercial building, and the firm had spec'd a LULA. The reasoning: the building is small and people should walk up the stairs instead. Nice. Doesn't even come close to meeting code, so we have to find an elevator that does, this after bid & contract...and since it took so long to plan we have to find one that fits in the space alloted for the original elevator and adjacent HVAC shaft- found one that barely fit, cost extra $25,000 all said & done...
Same project, building almost completely finished, including bathrooms. First floor- HC stall is drawn big enough, but stall next to it is drawn at 5' long w/ inswing door...looks good...except no clearances are met for the door and panels next to the HC stall- 3" panel at wall, 2'-10" door, 12" to next stall. We showed 1", 2'-8", and 8", respectively. Unfortunately didn't catch this until everything has been installed and received word we failed plumbing inspection because the next stall was too small- the shops correctly showed all the HC clearances, leaving the stall only 4'-6" long which I never realized when checking the shops (I was concerned about all the ADA codes)...with elongated commercial toilet there are exactly 2" from bowl to door, not enough for a skinny person to squeeze through. THAT was embarrassing...there is no way to enlarge the room so we switched the door to outswing into HC path...am hoping for no future lawsuits.
These mistakes are SO maddening since these codes could easily have been read YEARS ago and the basics covered but the architects couldn't be bothered...
One more: at my first job doing drafting/redlines, and my boss railed on me for my biggest mistakes: not stapling the binding on the CD sets just right (NOT kidding) and in the CD set missing a lineweight on the elevation, like having a hatch a darker shade than intended...what a dick...after 2 years I finally yelled back and quit 3 months later after landing a new job-WOO-HOO!!
Mistakes
Well I just had twenty five feet of wall painted the wrong accent color, brown instead of red. Put the wrong designation in the schedule, on a project with a lot of different paint colors. Great thing is no one noticed except me and then I was the one who pointed it out in front of everyone because the painters have screwed up so much I thought for sure it had to be them again (yes it really has been them this is my first and only mistake). It works out though because the owner a city loves the color painted wrong.
Did here about someone though back in the days of paint having just numbers not names putting down the wrong room, causing a whole auditorium to be painted violet. They had to pay to have it painted.
No I am not an interior designer I just thought these mistakes were more light hearted than the beam that the engineer had put the 24" channel on in front of a glass curtain wall system for wind and did not tell anyone, solution just tear it off we really did not need it anyway.
we found out that a 4" pvc sewer was laid directly below a footing (about to be poured) yesterday. still dealing with a proposed fix.
this is my nightmare thread.
seriously, i've gotten a cold, dread feeling in my stomach just reading all of this.
haven't screwed anything up that bad (yet) but i am waiting for it.
"No one ever got sued over the wrong paint color." One of our project architects says this all the time. It keeps me up at night.
About three months into my career, I was working on a small residential project that underwent several iterations. We were in a rush to get the CDs out and in my haste, I forgot to update the window schedule, so the contractor ended up ordering all the wrong window sizes. I'm one for admitting mistakes, but I always feel that my boss was partially responsible because he never bothered to look over the drawings before they went out. He just stamped them without looking them over, which is when I decided I had to leave that office.
I worked for a firm that wasn't exactly sued over the wrong paint color but did pay dearly for it. The responsible architect chose a "white" paint that seemed appropriate under the lighting conditions inside the office. But when seen outside under direct sunlight had a strong pinkish hue, which was greatly disturbing to the owner. The office took responsibility and ponied up the $30,000 to fix the error...it was a lot of pink.
Yikes, that sucks walldrug. Thankfully, our specifications call for an on-site mock-up prior to the sub-contractor purchasing the paint - I'm not sure if it's part of MasterSpec or if our spec writer threw that in.
we're going to try to leave the pvc sewer line below that footing. key will be determining that a 4" sch40 pvc can sustain 750psf crush load. from what i've been able to learn, it may actually be designed to resist 1500 psf. that would be great.
if not, we gotta tell them to remove all the rebar that's already been set and tied, dig out the 12" of #57s, and remove and backfill the sewer trench, then reset the line about 18" over to one side.
would really like to not have to do that...
never shower with a cat
okay so here's my most recent one
we are designing a 4-building compound in wyoming, which will serve as our client's ski-house. there is an existing log home which had several additions when we did the as-built drawings (which have sinse been demolished). as it was the only thing existing to remain more or less in place (but with several older additions to be demolished) it was used as a datum to square up the new constructions. there was also an existing garage, which was picked up and moved to be parallel with the house, ~100 feet away. the buildings essentially form a large rectangle around a courtyard, and three of them (garage and main house with a new guest house in between) are connected by a long, flat-roofed open air structure, which was to be one of the significant architectural features of the project, creating a long line of sight from the garage to the guest house, and ending centered on one of the main house front doors. the fourth is fully connected to the existing house on the other side of the courtyard, essentially making them one structure. this is not to pass the buck onto the contractor but he needed to have the garage moved first so he could keep his crew moving to pour the foundations last fall, so the garage was poured prior to any of the other construction or demo. however, in laying out the other new buildings and additions, relative to the house and the newly moved garage, it was discovered that the garage is 1 degree out of square with the house, which means the south walls of each building to be connected by the canopy thing are three feet off, and we've lost a major line of site between all three buildings. apparently the main house was significantly out of square, but it was impossible for the surveyors who staked the foundation to be able to notice this, as the side of the house that faces the garage had a significant old addition which hadn't been demolished yet at the time they laid it out.
I accidentally put dimension strings on room labels. The line weight they used in CAD for these label borders looked exactly like the line weights for partitions so I was confused. My PM looked at me with a blank stare and asked if I had gotten enough sleep.
huh. i don't know how you did that. that kind of reminds me of the classic concrete stair troweled to the detail tag.
Yeah that was a real gem. Totally one of those DUH moments.
Sn example.... See line weights and 2 hours of sleep.... and two weeks on the job. This was a long time ago BTW...
yeesh bossman, that sounds like you have very few options to fix it... and the "blame" can be shared / denied equally by everyone on the project, meaning hopefully everyone can kick in together to solve this issue. What are you going to do?
leave it. our designer talked the client into it, that it is not "bad" but that you see the corner logs of the garage at the end of the sight-line, there is a kind of serendipity to how the canopy now "meanders" around the spaces a bit, and that it adds character to the project. several radical options were seriously considered though, including tear out and re-pour the guest house footings, or up root the garage, move it, destroy the new foundation, and re-pour it. from a value engineering perspective, these options defy the laws of common sense. it's just architecture. it will still be a beautiful project, not really better or worse but just different. mistakes to me are now inevitable, and more a matter of when than if. a good designer can take advantage of these things and incorporate them into the project, in the same way he takes advantage of the little serendipitous "accidents" which occur during the design process.
yep, i find myself thinking those same kinds of thoughts almost all the time nowadays about random mistakes like that. they're not even really mistakes... just quirks that ended up happening during construction. That's how I feel on the GOOD days. On the bad days, I'm still pissed... especially if it was a truly easily avoidable error, or easily fixable, or worst yet due to contractor negligence. ugh!
archmed your office uses way better fonts than mine.
i can't get pissed at contractors only because i make mistakes myself.
usually i'm happy when someone else screws up, that way i know there isn't anything wrong with me
Another time I also accidentally left fire rating around an ADA toilet that was converted from a VRC Lift. The layer was just turned off but when we were presenting the new layout to a client that was the first thing that popped up.
She just looked up at us and was like "why would you need to fire rate an ADA toilet." It was actually pretty hilarious.
I can get pissed at contractors who make mistakes out of laziness and negligence. I make mistakes, but not out of laziness -- usually out of the opposite : being overworked and overtired. It galls me to no end to arrive on-site to a construction site where the "super" refuses to walk around the jobsite or even to leave his air-conditioned trailer, takes every Friday off to golf, leaves after exact union hours without staying one minute late to deal with anything at all (despite being way behind on his own schedule), and THEN, throws up his hands when mistakes on the job come up in discussion and either points the finger at me ("if you had gotten me that sketch earlier... my guys had already done the work!" <--- this while the actual timestamps of the sent sketch directly contradicted him) or pushes the client to pay for the fix. Or worse yet, convinces the client "it's not that bad anyway, the architect is just arrogant and has to have it the way he wants it, it's actually better the way i did it but the architect doesn't know any better... you understand right, har har har, those architects..." and the client comes back to me and tells me i am wasting his money by trying to fix the mistake and to let the contractor "do his job" and that i'm arrogant and he's fine with whatever it looks like, he doesn't even know why he pays for an architect anyway.
ok, sorry, phew, that was some venting...
there is no such thing as a mistake, there are things you do and things you dont do
yeah the worst is when the client lives at the job site, such as a renovation, and the contractor conspires with them. most of the contractors i work with like architecture, which is why they work on more high end "architectural" residential projects, and are more or less pretty sensitive to what we want. luckily, most of our clients are patrons of architecture as well, and don't like people talking them around doing things they've already paid us to design.
this thread makes me feel better about myself...
Earlier this year I was reviewing the shop drawings for an escalator and couldn't figure out how long the thing was actually going to be. The termination detail at the bottom was quite a bit different than our basis of design. Eventually I decided it was probably ok, since the contractor had submitted it. Turned out the escalator was 12" longer than the space we had allotted for it and the contractor had to pour a new concrete wall right next to the existing foundation wall to support it. Fortunately it was all done at their cost.
When I was an office boy in Bean Town one of my jobs was to do some of the filing in the receptionist area. We had two receptionist one was older and single, quiet as a mouse, the other was the product of all girls schools including college. So anyhow we have these fire proof four door files and I with my hands full pull on the top drawer which opens a bit quicker than I would have liked striking me in the chest and knocking me off balance so backward I go with my hands coming back to help catch myself from the fall but all I caught was the back bottom side of the young receptionist who upon having my hands smacking her on the butt lets out a bloody murder scream which brings all of the partners and the business manager running. You can only image the flush of my face as I was all of 19
years old at the time.
i built a portfolio case wrong.... it was a for a client.... it was during the winter time and when i delivered it, i slipped on some ice and busted my ass on the sidewalk. i laid there for about a minute and thought i blew my bad knee out again. well, i managed to deliver it and i get an email stating it was too big....wtf..... so i flet like an ass and built a new one that was a bit better.
on the flip side. i have saved a few asses from issues not only in the field but also in the shop..... 1 time when i was contracting at this other model shop, we had an elevation that as wrong and missing some windows... the model had to be shipped in the morning and it was the late the night before.... instead of trying to take off the whole elevation which was about 24x24 just to toss in a row of windows, i managed to take a knife and cut through a score line and snap of the piece and then run that section in the laser to cut the windows. the entire elevation would have broke if we tried to take it off.....
on the job site i seen my ex-brother in law take a jigsaw to his pinky figure and cut half way through.... with a rough-wood blade on high speed.
I hate mistakes on my jobs made before I started but am now in charge of and left defending (if possible)...
I was given an old project about to go into construction when I started my job. As the project has been in planning and design for over FIVE years I figured the major things had already been covered, like elevator and bathroom code??..NOPE!!! Commercial building, and the firm had spec'd a LULA. The reasoning: the building is small and people should walk up the stairs instead. Nice. Doesn't even come close to meeting code, so we have to find an elevator that does, this after bid & contract...and since it took so long to plan we have to find one that fits in the space alloted for the original elevator and adjacent HVAC shaft- found one that barely fit, cost extra $25,000 all said & done...
Same project, building almost completely finished, including bathrooms. First floor- HC stall is drawn big enough, but stall next to it is drawn at 5' long w/ inswing door...looks good...except no clearances are met for the door and panels next to the HC stall- 3" panel at wall, 2'-10" door, 12" to next stall. We showed 1", 2'-8", and 8", respectively. Unfortunately didn't catch this until everything has been installed and received word we failed plumbing inspection because the next stall was too small- the shops correctly showed all the HC clearances, leaving the stall only 4'-6" long which I never realized when checking the shops (I was concerned about all the ADA codes)...with elongated commercial toilet there are exactly 2" from bowl to door, not enough for a skinny person to squeeze through. THAT was embarrassing...there is no way to enlarge the room so we switched the door to outswing into HC path...am hoping for no future lawsuits.
These mistakes are SO maddening since these codes could easily have been read YEARS ago and the basics covered but the architects couldn't be bothered...
One more: at my first job doing drafting/redlines, and my boss railed on me for my biggest mistakes: not stapling the binding on the CD sets just right (NOT kidding) and in the CD set missing a lineweight on the elevation, like having a hatch a darker shade than intended...what a dick...after 2 years I finally yelled back and quit 3 months later after landing a new job-WOO-HOO!!
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.