Renovations: tips for the planning stage

By: engineer Ron Arad, Arad Bedek Bayit

A renovation starts long before you choose a contractor, at the planning stage. Renovation work involves a range of parameters and constraints that need to be weighed against each other, and that means bringing in the right professional for each part of the job.

Architects

Start with an architect who specializes in this kind of work, and explain your requirements and goals clearly. The architect has to work within the Planning and Building Regulations and build them into the new design.

For example: if you want to widen a room at the expense of the hallway, the architect should warn you that a hallway has a minimum width set by its length, and that compromising on it has safety consequences.

An experienced architect will also take precise measurements of the existing space and check the diagonals to confirm the walls are parallel, since new flooring will otherwise make any deviation in the walls obvious.

Electrical and plumbing consultants

If you are building a new bathroom or making major changes to the plumbing or electrical systems, bring in a plumbing consultant and an electrical consultant.
It is worth paying for this: their fee is small next to the overall renovation cost.

As a rule of thumb, a plumbing consultant costs 1,000 to 2,000 NIS for a renovation of about 200,000 NIS, roughly 1% of the total, and it prevents damage and stress that can run to thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of shekels in defects.

Trusting your own electrician or plumber to plan the job as well as do it can be a costly gamble, unless they are true top-tier professionals whom you know well and can supervise closely. Otherwise, do not skip the consultants.

Here are a few examples from our own experience, from home inspections (bedek bayit) we carried out for construction defects in renovated apartments:

1. Poor plumbing design creates construction defects of its own, water pressure problems among them. Pipe diameters need to be planned correctly all the way from the water meter outside the house to every fixture (toilet, shower, and so on). Get the diameters wrong, too small or too large, and you get incorrect flow rates and pressure that is too low or too high. High pressure is a problem too: it causes noise and wears out piping faster. In an apartment we inspected in Ramat HaSharon, the pipe diameters turned out to be smaller than required, so pressure dropped sharply whenever the sink and shower taps were opened together, leaving neither one working properly. A proper plumbing plan handed to the renovation contractor, rather than trusting the contractor to also act as the planner, would have prevented this.
2. In electrical work, never rely on the renovation contractor, or even on a supervisor if you hired one: most construction workers know little about electrical systems, which leaves the electrician as the only real authority. In one inspection in a religious neighborhood in Jerusalem, the electrician had failed to separate the outlet circuits from the lighting circuits, which ruled out installing a Shabbat timer, since switching off the lights would also cut power to the outlets in that area. The owner had to pay for expensive rewiring just to separate the circuits.

Another example: an inspection in Netanya found that the owner had forgotten to tell the contractor to install wiring for a heater in the bathrooms. A professional electrical consultant would have simply asked whether the owner wanted heaters installed, something standard in every new apartment today.