I think I will use one of my many personal projects that
get out of hand. Last year I built an addition onto our home because I gave my
office to our oldest daughter and we had a baby on the way. It was going to be
partially my office and half for the baby. However, it has since become my
office/rec room completely; my little fortress of solitude if you will.
In the
process of drywalling I encountered an issue with the doorway and the electrical
during a city inspection. Since the new door was in the old exterior wall, it
was a load bearing area. So I had to include load bearing headers that the
framing for was not there at all. This meant removing more existing drywall,
installing the jack studs and header and then patching more drywall to cover
this all back up. The other issue was some recessed lighting I had all
installed. They needed electrical boxes, not just nuts and electrical tape, at
every patch junction; 6 locations. So I had to run another lead wire run and
rewire the entire line into it so where they met would be inside the boxes.
Had I been a real contractor I would have been aware of
these local codes (not something I dealt with back in rural Nebraska) and I
would have already planned these activities into the project. The work pushed
me back a few days labor, which translated to three weeks delay in the overall project
time. There were other cases of things like this that overall made the project five
months longer than I planned.
In the end the timing still worked out, I was done with
the exterior before it got too cold and finished the interior by my daughter’s
first birthday. Knowing what I know now I would have contracted out the
concrete and finishing (drywall and paint) work. Those two areas caused me the
most pain; physically and financially.
Relating this to our course, I would underscore the importance of understanding the time requirements for all the parts of a project BEFORE starting it. Either knowing them first hand from experience, or working with experienced people of the field who can give you real usable data.
Lucas,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post. It made me remember when I rented a house and had repainted and wallpapered a room. I suddenly realized the electricity did not work as I expected in the room, and I thought I had done something.After first having a friend over that could not figure out the problem I got a professional over. He had also problem, but finally found out that the wires were routed in an odd way. It was not my fault. But it took almost a week from finding the issue until it was resolved.
/Millan
Lucas,
ReplyDeleteHaving been the project manager for the two houses I have built, I feel your pain. Our first house we built in a county with no building codes but had luckily used a contractor for the framing from the neighboring county who was familiar with codes as I decided to modify the house plan midway through creating an unstable 2nd story. The contractor was able to call the building inspector (a building engineer) from the neighboring county to come and advise as to how we could remedy the problem and meet the neighboring counties strict code even though we did not have a code in our county. This small change in my plans ended up costing an extra $6K. Defnite scope creep.
Fortunately, I had built in a contingency into the project and had done a very good job of estimating costs down to the actual doorknobs on the interior doors. I have found that all project management is a learning experience and we take what we learn from each experience ad use it to assist us in the next. In my second house, my husband was my contractor after the logs were stacked for our current log home. Six years later we are still working on it. This weekend we tore the entire kitchen apart as I am finally putting in granite countertops (I have been using "temporary" ones made out of plywood and bamboo flooring. I decided today to rearrange the cabinets while I had the chance and just when we had them how I wanted them, my husband reminded me that they had already measured and cut the granite so we had to take them all back out and replace them in the original configuration causing an entire delay in the pre-work that has to be done before the countertops can be installed.