Best-Laid Plans of Designing Men

My mother said she was not coming to visit again until I fixed up my bathroom.

I put it off for more than a year.

She came for her annual visit/inspection anyway, and before returning to Florida she reminded me several times that patching the large hole in the wall under the sink (from when a plumber had to get to a leaking pipe) would go a long way toward making my little home more presentable.

Ma and others who have commented on the gaping hole in the plasterboard simply don’t understand that I have big plans for the bath. It doesn’t make sense to patch a hole when any weekend now, I am going to start the big remodel.

Finally, my friend Charlie (with whom I think my mother has been speaking in secret) urged me to test one of the several home-design computer programs on the market by using it to draw up bathroom plans. I picked out one of the most prominent of such consumer programs, “3D Home Architect,” distributed by the usually reliable Broderbund company.

“Even beginners can use it for everything from remodeling a room to designing a new house,” proclaims the back of the box that holds the Windows program (about $50 for the disk version, $75 for the CD-ROM). The CD-ROM comes with a 230-page manual and another book of “Bonus Sample Plans,” a guide to whole-house plans included in the program.

These sample homes, with names such as “One With the Sun” and “Welcome to the Neighborhood” did not look promising. But these days so few of us can afford to build a home from scratch anyway, it seemed much more practical to try out the remodeling capabilities of “3D Home Architect.”

To get into a domestic mood, Charlie and I put on a 1950s greatest hits CD, and with Rosemary Clooney singing “Mambo Italiano” in the background, we fired up the program and went to work.

Unfortunately, “3D Home Architect” is not the kind of program you can dive into without a careful reading of the manual. But with my reading the text out loud, Charlie was able to use the mouse to draw the basic walls of my bathroom, according to measurements I had taken earlier, and then highlight the location of my existing door.

That’s when we ran into our first big problems. Professional Computer-Assisted Design (CAD) programs are notoriously complex and for good reason. The processes of drawing plans and then examining them from a variety of perspectives including 3-D take up a lot of computer memory and call for sophisticated rendering of objects.

Dummied-down versions of these programs for us untrained consumers are still fairly dense. The manual for “3D Home Architect” was of limited help. Several re-readings and failed attempts were required before we succeeded in getting the door to swing open the right way.

It took about another half-hour to get the bathroom’s existing window in place (moving items around a plan is not easy in this program until you get the hang of it) and choose a ceramic tile floor.

Now, on to the fixtures. “3D Home Architect” has built-in, standard sizes for furniture and other items, including tubs, sinks and toilets. The program lets you use non-standard dimensions, but not without considerable effort.

I am almost six feet tall and have dreamed of having a bathtub long enough to lie in without scrunching up my legs. I was willing to accept a small sink to make room for the tub, but getting the program to deal with these variations on the norms took long periods of trial and error.

Perhaps the coolest feature of the program is its 3-D capabilities, allowing views of the room from different angles with the fixtures fully rendered. After another spate of finagling, we managed to get overhead and side views of the bathroom.

In this mode, we were given color options, and this is where Charlie and I had our biggest disagreements. He was well on his way to giving the room a “Barbie’s Dream House” look before I could successfully demand that even with Caterina Valente singing “The Breeze and I” in the background, I would not accept avocado as a color scheme.

Finally, my little bathroom was all laid out and I was ready to call a carpenter to get an estimate. I could almost hear Mom making her reservations.