Doorways

This morning Ezekiel was helping his friend Chris with wiring his new house. As I was looking around investigating the new construction, I was perplexed with why the doorways were made so short. Now, I can get through unscathed, but I’m only 1.65 meters (as determined through cell phone unit converter), but most other people have to duck while passing through. When I presented this question, it was met with further perplexed stares. Fortuitously, the architect of the design happened to come by moments later and I had the chance to pick his brain on this matter.

What I had initially questioned as lack of planning, was quite well-planned and reasoned. Designs here in Gembu are created based on number of rows of bricks and those bricks can come in a variety of sizes. The size of the bricks determines the height of the doorway. I still wasn’t satisfied with his answer and pressed him further. Why not simply put the doorway up one more row of bricks? If there is not a minimum of three rows of bricks above the header of the door, it’s not structurally sound. At this point I was able to begin extrapolating more of the nuances surrounding the issue: adding another row of bricks all the way around the entire house would add significant expense to the project which would delay its completion. Because while in the US you would simply take out a slightly larger loan, here you just have to wait longer to get the money to buy more bricks. Really, a shorter doorway doesn’t seem like that big of a deal anymore.