Things I wish I knew when I started

In coming up with a topic for my second blog entry, I wanted something “big,” a summation of my collective experience of 15+ years elbow deep in various remodeling projects. So I started by considering the few most important things I've learned during that time. But I quickly ran into a problem -- not with coming up with important subjects, there were more than enough of those. Instead, I couldn’t decide which ones to leave out. After all, is plumbing any less important than electrical wiring? Or the roof less important than the sills? Or the flooring less important than the walls? Or...well, you get the idea. It was hard to determine the relative importance of each topic -- everything seemed equally critical in its way.

So I approached the question from a different angle: What things do I know now that I wish I had known when I started? When I thought of it that way, some basic ideas started falling together. For instance – and the fact that this is so obvious makes it no less important – I wish I had a better handle on the typical costs involved in remodeling projects. When I began, I was incredibly naïve in this area. I thought (and please don’t laugh) that $10,000 should be plenty to cover any bathroom or kitchen remodeling, and $25,000 or so more than enough for a major addition to a house. It didn’t take long for me to learn just how far off I was. First, consider labor. A typical work crew can easily cost several hundred dollars per hour. And even when I did much of the work myself, I discovered that materials such as plywood and lumber and nails may seem cheap when purchased for some weekend workshop project, but in quantities required for major remodeling, they are significant expenses. It only took a project or two for me to realize that it wasn’t at all unusual to be halfway through the work and then suddenly discover that the money I put aside had vanished faster than a snowflake in a bonfire. A better handle on the true costs of my projects might have avoided months of living in a partially completed house, stumbling around in-progress work.

Then there’s that most precious of all resources, time. Few if any projects turned out to be quicker than I anticipated. Indeed, I considered myself lucky if they only overran by a little. This was especially true of work that I took on myself. There’s probably no better reminder of the everyday demands on your time than getting involved in a project that you absolutely have to finish yourself. No matter how carefully I plan – and how much extra time I factor into the equation – my projects invariably take significantly longer than I anticipate. There’s been more than one case where I simply conceded defeat, and ended up hiring someone else to do the work. My rule of thumb now when scheduling a project is to imagine the worst-case scenario of how long a particular project could possibly take – and then doubling that amount of time. It’s as accurate a way as any to try to determine how long the disruption will be to our home life.

Of course, I could have saved myself substantial amounts of both time and money if I could somehow go back and offer my younger self this single piece of wisdom: before beginning any project, identify the few absolutely critical aspects, and separate them from the ones that all in all just aren’t that important. I used to go around with a mental vision of the perfect house in my head, obsessed with getting every minute detail exactly the way I wanted it. If I could snap my fingers and make it all happen magically, I might still approach home improvement this way. But I soon learned how easy it was to get bogged down, wasting time and money on trivialities at the expense of the really important areas of the job. Gradually, I learned to “let go,” and accept “satisficing” as a way to handle the mundane decisions. This may sound like I’m advocating mediocre or substandard work in certain areas, but I’m not. Perfectionism may sound fine in theory, but over the years I’ve discovered that perfectionism leads to paralysis, with nothing every getting done because there’s no way to make anything perfect, no matter how much money and energy you devote to it. If from the beginning I could have sorted out the truly essential from the things that I have subsequently learned don’t really matter one way or the next, I might have gotten a lot more accomplished (and suffered a lot fewer headaches).

So these are the three things I wish I knew back when I got started in this whole home improvement thing: projects invariably cost more than you think, they’ll take more time than you anticipate, and to minimize these two problems, don’t sweat the small stuff. They may not sound like the most profound of observations, but they’re nonetheless true. Some of this I’ve learned the hard way. But better late than never!