Why we begin on site
Process
The first visit is for looking, the second for measuring, and neither one is for drawing.
A drawing made before the second site visit is a guess with a scale bar on it. We made a few of those in the early years, and every one of them cost more to correct on site than the delay would have cost at the start.
So the order is fixed now. Two visits before anything is drawn. One to look, one to measure, on different days and where the programme allows in different weeks. Clients in a hurry find this the hardest part of working with us, and it is the part we will not trade.
The first visit
We arrive without a tape. We open every door, stand in each room longer than is comfortable, and watch how far the light reaches at that hour. Then we come back at the other end of the day and watch again. In a Lisbon apartment the difference between those two hours can be six metres of reach down the plan, and no floor plan will tell you that.
The rest of the first visit is listening to the building. Which boards move. Whether the plumbing runs on the party wall. Where a previous owner gave up and put a cupboard. Half of what a site tells you is a record of what somebody else already tried, and most of those attempts failed for a reason that has not gone away.
The second visit
The measured survey is the slow day and the one that pays. Openings twice. Diagonals in every room. Ceiling height in four places, because in a building from 1890 it will not be the same in four places. Anything we cannot reach is written down as unknown rather than assumed, and the unknowns go onto the drawing in the same weight as the dimensions.
At Casa Margeride the two visits rewrote the brief. The family arrived with a demolition plan drawn by someone else, three walls out, and we asked for six weeks before agreeing to any of it. Standing in the middle of a plan 22 metres deep at four in the afternoon made the argument without us. The gloom came from arches that had been filled in and painted a warm off-white, not from the walls. Nothing structural moved in the end.
None of this is slowness for its own sake. Two site days cost less than one week of joinery built to a wrong dimension, and they are the only chance anyone gets to see a building before it turns into a set of drawings everyone has started to believe.