To all Al-Mutlaa residents, Be careful (5).

It is known that there is no building without a blueprint, and there is no blueprint without an engineering office, and we do not have a qualified engineering office. Big offices do not provide villa blueprints except at prices that reach more than 15,000 KD, other than the monthly supervision expenses, which are not less than 1,500 KD. Even small engineering offices of highly professional quality have the same prices. The capital of any engineering office is its engineers and technicians, which means that their monthly salaries should be paid. Everyone knows that a good employee is always paid a high salary, but there are some offices in the market that are called "stamped," which means that it is an office owned by a Kuwaiti citizen, who in turn rents it to an expat engineer annually or on a percentage of the income. You may find that most of the engineers in this office have part-time jobs. For example, a decade ago, I knew an engineer of Arab nationality who worked in the morning in the municipality and in the evening in more than one engineering office. He was preparing the license and registering it into the municipality’s automated licensing system, and he himself received it in the morning and licensed it. He had a nice personality, but he got an amount ranging from 350 KD to 500 KD for the villas’ blueprints and 1,000 KD with a maximum of 2500 KD for residential buildings and complexes. Imagine how many blueprints he can extract per day and what the costs are. He is an engineer who receives a salary from the state and uses the engineering office to charge it on a percentage or hourly basis. I do not know, and God knows best. But what happens is that these engineers supply licenses at very reasonable prices to citizens, but in doing so, they take the actual offices out of the market, whose Kuwaiti owners use all their efforts and money, as the first does not have operating expenses and does this work as a part-time job. While the second is compelled to pay thousands of dinars in salaries that must be paid monthly. So, some of them, and even some large offices, hire a lot of expat engineers with low salaries so that they can compete, but this lowers the level of architectural creativity and meticulous work.

Therefore, in the absence of a municipality, Kuwait has become an architectural disgrace. Back to the citizen wanting a license, and I will give him some advice: Firstly, do not accept the first design presented to you by the office; because it is usually an exact copy of a ready-made blueprint and has been given to more than one client. Secondly, before you approve the blueprint, you and your wife must know exactly what you want. It should be real, not fiction, and in line with the budget. You should keep in mind that the entire area of the land is four hundred meters. The blueprint is misleading. I'll use the example of a friend whose wife desired a circular staircase similar to the one in the old film "Mabodat Al Gamaheer" by Shadia and Abdel Halim Hafez."Indeed, the engineer designed a circular staircase for her around the elevator. It appears well in the blueprint, but at the level of execution, it was not as perfect. I frankly advised him, but he did not listen to me, as it seemed that the height of the staircase was more than 20 cm, and this is an annoying height, and with time it hurts the knees, as the ideal height of the staircase is 16 cm. Secondly, the circular stairs need at least 130 cm in diameter, since with the roll of the stairs, we see the width of the staircase from the far left is 15 cm, the middle is 30 cm, and the maximum right is 40 cm, so that it looks good and is practical, and you can use the stairs without feeling any pain. His staircase had a diameter of 110 cm, and the average width of the step was more than 20 cm, with the result that half of his feet were outside the staircase. Imagine that he suffers from this staircase and sees it all his life; this is, of course, a simple example. But there is another problem facing many citizens that they do not notice, which is the structural plan, the distribution of the pillars, and their actual size, not as you see it in the blueprint, and we will discuss it in the next article.

Stay Safe.