You will make these decisions either way. The only question is what week you make them in.
Every renovation contains a handful of decisions which cost almost nothing in the week they come up and are not undone cheaply afterwards. Where a hand goes when you stand. How wide a doorway is. Which floor the bathroom is on. You'll decide every one of them, whether you know it or not. Most people decide them by default, in the week the wall closes, and find out what they decided a year later.
This course is the list, in the order each decision closes, with the page you hand to whoever you're paying next. Nine written modules, a Project File you fill in as you go, no cohort, no start date, yours to keep.
Nobody on the job is paid to tell you which week it is.
The contractor is paid to build what's drawn. The designer is paid to draw what you asked for. The therapist writes down what your body needs and has never seen your bathroom. Everybody answers the question they were asked. Nobody is paid to ask the one you didn't know to ask, and it is the one which decides what the finished house costs you to live in.
The wall you reopen.
A bar into blocking, while the wall is open, is a piece of lumber and ten minutes. The same bar a year later is a wall opened back up, patched, tiled, painted, and a contractor who has to be talked into coming back for a small job. You pay for the room twice and get the same bar.
The room you stop using.
The upstairs shower stops getting used and the downstairs one gets used instead, and if there's no downstairs one, somebody has to be in the house. Nobody decides this. It happens to a bathroom nobody thought about while the drawing was still a drawing.
The finished room you hate.
A change you hate is a change you stop using, and a change you stop using cost the full price for nothing. Most of what's sold for this looks like it came from a hospital, and the course spends a whole module on refusing it.
None of these is dramatic. Each one is a five-figure project quietly doing less than it was paid to do, for as long as you live in it. $297 is the cost of finding out in the right week.
Six inches of hallway costs nothing on a drawing.
On paper it is a line moved slightly to the left. Nobody charges you for it and nobody notices you did it. Six weeks later it is a framed wall, and moving it means demolition, a new permit, and a contractor who was not planning on this.
Every other course in this category goes room by room. This one goes in the order the money moves, because the bathroom is not the first decision. The date the wall closes is.
Open each moment to see the kind of decision which closes there. The specific items, with their dimensions and who signs off on each, are the course.
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The cheapest week of the whole project, and the one nobody treats as a decision point.
- Widths. A hall, a doorway, the turn into a bathroom.
- Where a room sits. Which floor the bedroom is on, whether a shower exists on the level you live on.
- What not to touch. The fences around money, dates, taste and who decides.
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A few weeks in which the inside of the wall is visible. Almost everything here is a small material cost and a large cost later.
- Blocking behind the drywall, where a hand goes when you stand up.
- Where the outlets, switches and controls end up, and at what height.
- The drain, the valve, and what the shower is allowed to become later.
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Finishes go on and the wall is no longer a question. Whatever is behind the tile is behind it for the life of the room.
- Thresholds and the step you will cross forty times a day.
- Fixture heights, reach, and what a chair pulls up to.
- The surfaces you will be looking at, and whether you'll use the room you paid for.
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Some things stay cheap forever, and the course tells you which, so you spend on the ones which don't.
- Hardware. Handles, pulls, a bar into blocking you already put there.
- Furniture, lighting, the objects nobody bothered to design well.
- Anything the Project File marked reversible.
Three ways people arrive, one set of decisions.
All three of you need the same information, and all three of you have been handed the wrong version of it: a catalogue, a warning, or a pamphlet. The course refuses all three.
Your body changed, and the house didn't.
A diagnosis, a surgery date, or a slow year, and everything written for you now reads like a medical catalogue. The course never asks what you have. It asks what a good day and a bad day each want from the building, and works from there.
You've been in the house thirty years and intend to stay.
Everything written for you reads like a warning. This is written like a design brief, because the house is yours, and the point is to keep using all of it rather than to be managed inside it.
You're doing this for someone you love.
You hold the budget, you're searching at night, and everything you find is a caregiving pamphlet. The course gives you the questions, and one rule it will not bend: the person whose house it is gets to decide.
If the house isn't yours to change, most of this still applies. How to look at a room and what to ask for need neither a permit nor a landlord's permission.
I've heard all four of these, and I've said two of them.
Ask him. He'll answer the question you asked, and he'll be right. He is paid to build what's on the drawing, and by the time he's on the job the drawing is done. The course is what you bring to him so the right things are on it before he quotes.
Then you're in the cheapest week there is. Everything in part one happens before a drawing exists and changes what gets drawn. The person who reads this with a contractor already booked gets less out of it than you will.
You'll find rooms. Every guide in this category goes room by room, and the order the money moves in isn't a room. What's behind the drywall closes on the same day in the kitchen and the bathroom, and nobody organises the advice around the day. This does.
Against a five-figure project, it's one door width. Buy it, read part one, and if the Day Map and the House Cost Audit haven't told you something about your own house you didn't have written down, you've spent an evening and a small amount of money. If they have, you've changed what gets built.
I hold the credential, and I live in the constraint.
Briana J Watson, Certified Environmental Access Consultant (CEAC). Chicago.
I'm a Certified Environmental Access Consultant. The certification is in assessing a house for what it lets a body do, at any age, and what it quietly stops you doing. The dimensions in this course come from the published standards, and each one is marked as a standard or as my own specification, so you always know which you're looking at.
The rest is lived experience. Eight diagnoses, good days and bad ones in the same week, and a Chicago two-flat where I'm currently planning a renovation around my worst days. Before any of this, I spent twenty years of making a case to people who could say no. The course is the same skill, pointed at a contractor.
If your house doesn't work for you on a bad day, then it doesn't work.The measure the whole course runs on
Organised by when a decision stops being cheap.
Each module is a sitting, not an afternoon. You'll finish a short one on a bad day and abandon a long one, and a course you didn't finish taught you nothing.
The Intake
The day first, then the house. What comes out: the Day Map, the House Cost Audit, the Project Fences.
- 1Your dayWhat a good day and a bad day each ask of the building, written down.
- 2What the house costsEverything in the building which bothers you, in minutes and effort rather than in a diagnosis.
- 3Already decidedMoney, dates, the building, taste, who decides. The fences you build before anyone draws anything.
The Thinking
What the house has to do. What comes out: the Requirements Page, six columns a contractor works from.
- 4Body, then buildingWrite the requirement before the solution. Almost every renovation done twice was done from a solution.
- 5You don't have to settle for uglyA change you hate is a change you stop using, and a change you stop using cost the full price for nothing.
- 6Order of operationsThe closing window. Fifteen things which disappear behind the drywall, each marked doing, not doing, or need to ask.
The People Being Paid
Who to ask, what to ask them, and what to sign. What comes out: the routing sheet, the questions sheet, the quote check.
- 7What to askWhich question belongs to which trade. Most of the money wasted in this category is wasted by asking the wrong person.
- 8Reading a quoteEvery requirement against every quote line, the contract questions, and the bad day walked through the finished room.
- 9The lineWhere my scope ends, which questions are licensed ones, and the next page.
Two resources sit alongside the modules: Finding Money for the Work, updated on its own schedule, and What to Add to Any Renovation. And a renovation checklist, on its own, for the people who wanted one all along.
You leave with one file, not a pile of notes.
Every module asks you to write something down, and every one of those pages lives in the Project File. Fill it on screen, on paper, or on a page saving your progress as you go, and print it when you're done.
It's the document you bring to whoever you're paying next, and the one thing in this course a contractor will read.
- The Day MapModule 1. The house on a good day and on a bad one.
- The House Cost AuditModule 2. Everything which bothers you, bad-day items circled, your five right now.
- The Project FencesModule 3. Money, dates, the building, taste, who decides.
- The Requirements PageModules 4 to 7. What the house has to do, route, deadline, reversible, who decides, status.
- Things Nobody MakesModule 5. What you looked for and could not find.
- The Things Which DisappearModule 6. Fifteen items. The page you hand to whoever is building.
- The Routing SheetModule 7. Every open line, with a name beside it, and the next three calls.
- The Questions SheetModule 7. What to ask each person, ticked when answered in writing.
- The Quote CheckModule 8. Every requirement against every quote line.
- Contract QuestionsModule 8. What to get answered before signing.
- The Bad Day in the Finished RoomModule 8. The Day Map, walked through the new room.
Short by design, because finishing is the point.
The first part carries most of it
No module runs longer than a lunch break, and the first three do most of the work. If your energy runs out after part one, you already have the Day Map and the House Cost Audit, and those two change what you build.
Written, not filmed
Read it on a bad day with the brightness down, or print the whole course and read it away from a screen. Nothing in it depends on your being presentable at two in the afternoon.
No cohort, no start date
Nothing here assumes a pace. Take it in an afternoon or across a month. It stays yours for as long as the course exists.
Not the consultation
This is not me looking at your building, your drawing, or your days. If you'd rather have someone work through your specific house with you, the consultation is three sessions on it, and it is a separate purchase.
Where the line is.
I'm not an architect, a contractor, or a registered interior designer. Illinois restricts the last title and I don't hold it. I don't produce construction documents and nothing here is stamped. Where a decision touches structure, egress or life safety, the course says so and tells you who is licensed to answer it.
What you get from me is questions, and the order to ask them in.
Everything you need to decide, before the walls close.
Buy it once. Read it on the day the drawings arrive, and again on the day the quote does. The decisions in it are going to get made in your house this year, on paper for almost nothing or in drywall for the full price, and the week they close doesn't wait for you to be ready.
You don't have to talk to anybody to start this. You're allowed to learn which decisions are closing, and when, at eleven at night, three months before you're ready to say any of it out loud to a person. What you're not allowed is the week back, once the wall is closed.
- Nine written modules in three parts
- The Project File, fillable on screen, on paper, or on a page saving your progress
- Two resources and the renovation checklist
- The complete course as one download
- No cohort, no start date, no deadlines