How to get what you want from your builder

When I acquired my home it had no bathroom. There was a toilet walled off in the corner of the living room, complete with a basin.

The kitchen comprised a lonely old stainless-steel sink and a pig-iron 1950s cooker – the type with the grill levitating above it at hair-singeing height – in a breeze block cell that was tagged onto the back of the home some time pre the magic 1963.

The bedroom walls were painted parma violet and Barbie pink atop woodchip paper and the ceilings were clad in poly-lungsapping tiles. I needed a builder.

And with a builder comes a working relationship. Philosophers Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had views on relationships – and they should know, they had a complex one of their own: open and on-and-off.

Sartre wrote that relationships can be divided into co-operative or competitive ones – and I was aiming for the co-operative type in my constructive negotiations. But they can easily slip into the competitive variety that someone seeks to win or lose at, through dominance or subordination or opting out. Over a thin line from this is working together in co-operation – to create something of value; respecting each other’s needs without necessarily agreeing with them.

So what to do if you are intelligent and creative but not forcefully authoritative? If you want an end result without being a winner? You waver over that line – I ended up playing the “please indulge my crazy ways” card – but it was only a short-term deal.

We began well. The builder was lovely and I put him tacitly in charge. We agreed that insulation would be a warm addition to the home, that rooflights, wider doors and taller windows would enlighten the breezeblock cell, and that a bathroom and kitchen would be good things to have.

And he set to work.

Eyes were raised at black slate tiles going on the bathroom floor and part of the walls but he went for it.

Free-standing bath

Then we came to the free-standing bath which he suggested, due to the tight space, should go against the wall whereas I wanted – and the name “free-standing” does indeed offer a strong clue as to placement – it to be set out from the wall.

He showed me pictures, on his phone, of baths that were, as baths are, by the wall and I dug up a brochure of my bath standing back from a glass wall overlooking a swish, skyscrapered city.

While north Dublin backlands were not providing such a vista, the brochure did offer positioning suggestions. I sent my request home with an “I know it’s a bit mad but I’d really like it that way”. And with that, he kept his role as expert and I got my way, albeit as a nutter.

Next up with a conventional suggestion was the painter who, on encountering the generous ceiling height that even artisan dwellers were offered in this country a century ago, directed that I should put in a false ceiling to make things cosier.

“I see what you mean,” I said. “But, I dunno, there’s something about having the height... for some reason I like it.” And he indulged my airy ways.

Encounters in kitchen showrooms came up with further suggestions that needed countering. Three kitchen-plotters said it was impossible to have the kitchen along one wall in my small room but I knew it could be done. It had to go around the corner to fit everything in they said.

There would be a magic moment when, after I had explained what I wanted and they would draw it all in, they would press the computer button to show the finished “design” complete with a washing machine uncovered by any cupboard door – standing on its own around a corner from the rest of the kitchen, destroying the whole room. I mastered a dead-pan look to cover what in reality would be a credulous expression. “Thanks, I’ll think about it.”

One wall

When I finally found someone who agreed the kitchen could fit along one wall, he showed a final design punctured with narrow panels inserted to conceal spaces where the unit sizes didn’t quite match the wall length. I considered it and calculated in my head.

“I was just wondering,” I ventured, in a you’re-the-expert voice. “If you added all those panels together; whether we could combine them to create a drawer?”

I knew the answer already but it was his to give. He was silent while he pondered and did the sums.

“Yes,” he said. “If you like...” as if he’d known all along and was now indulging my off-the-wall desires … “you could have another drawer instead.” Another drawer instead of random useless thin panels breaking up my kitchen.

My please-indulge-my-strange-desires stance in the pursuit of harmony and getting what I wanted can work against you if you come across one of Sartre’s dominant types because then they will believe that this is you and not a role you are temporarily playing.

And there the relationship descends from co-operation to competition in which you are branded a foolish, ingenue while they indulge their authoritarian tendencies. But it worked, for me, as a temporary role with kind builders, painters and kitchen designers.