Judging distances

The other deficit this renovation project has highlighted in my skill set is my almost complete lack of visual spatialization abilities. As much as I hate to confirm sex role stereotypes, I've always had a problem with estimating distances or amounts. When I try to guess what size Tupperware container I need to store leftovers in, I always guess wrong, and I end up with food slopping over the sides or huge amounts of empty space in the container.

When we were planning the renovation, my (lack of) spatial skills became a thorn in my side. I'd look at the floor plans and try to get a good image of what the finished addition would look like. Then I'd go outside and stare at the ground where it was going, which Wagner had conveniently staked out with markers, and I couldn't reconcile the two. The floor plans showed the master bedroom (the bedroom part only, not counting the closets or bathroom) as being bigger than our current family room. Our family room is plenty big, so I thought, okay, the bedroom will be nice and big, and certainly big enough. Then I'd go outside and look at the part of the driveway that would be dedicated to the bedroom, and my confidence would waver. It sure didn't look that big. And the last thing I wanted was to disrupt our lives for 6 months and spend a huge amount of money for a bedroom that would be too small.

Before we made the final decision to go ahead, I knew I had to feel confident that the proposed space of the addition would be sufficient. So I went up to our bedroom, tape measure in hand, and measured out the dimensions of all our bedroom furniture (bed, nightstands, dresser, couch, bookcases). Then I went outside, armed with the kids' sidewalk chark and the tape measure again, and started sketching in all the furniture in outline on the ground.

Something was wrong. When I drew in where the bed would go, instead of crowding the outline of the bedroom floor, it looked scarcely bigger than a shoebox in relation to the outline of the walls. I must have measured the bed wrong. So I went back upstairs and remeasured the bed. Nope, I had the right dimensions. So then I went back outside and double-checked to make sure I had drawn it right. Yup; it was drawn correctly... but it still looked impossibly small. I sat there, flummoxed and scratching my head, when my daughter, Athena, came up and asked what I was doing. "I'm sketching out where the furniture will go in the new bedroom," I replied. "Well, you did it wrong, " she said, "the bed is way too small." She refused to believe me when I told her I had checked it and that the dimensions were in fact correct. So we went back upstairs a third time and remeasured again.

The outline still seemed way too small. So finally I told Athena to lie down on the "bed" on the ground. (The one benefit to being a parent is that you can order your children to do things you'd feel too silly to do yourself.) When she did so, the "bed" suddenly and magically became normal bed-sized, and it was clear that we had drawn it correctly. And it was also crystal-clear that our new bedroom would have way more than enough space to fit all our furniture and not feel crowded. Phew.

I think this is a good example of a paradox of Euclidean geometry, which is that filled space looks bigger than empty space. That's why real estate agents hate to be in the position of selling a vacant house, so I think I will call this the "Realtor's Paradox."