Earlier this year, near the end of April, we had a water
pipe break under the bathroom sink upstairs.
Apparently it broke early in the day, because when the kids arrived home
from school they raced around to turn off the water, start sopping things up and
called to tell us that it was raining in the kitchen. In my mind, even though
the kids described it, I was seeing maybe a little bit of staining on the
ceiling that we would have to fix, perhaps some carpet that would have to be
dried out with a fan. I was not prepared
for what I saw when I arrived home.
There were only two bedrooms that weren’t massively damaged
by the ordeal in the entire house. The
insurance company paid a mitigation team to come in and help dry out the house,
which involved cutting out flooring, cutting holes in ceilings, tearing out a
whole wall of kitchen cabinets and the entire wall behind my kitchen sink. Our home was in shambles, from the upstairs
bathroom, bonus room, stairway, closets, master bedroom, living room and kitchen. We were put up in a hotel for a month and
zero progress was made because of a ridiculous estimate from an adjuster that
made every contractor laugh and then run in the other direction. We finally decided we would have to do the
work ourselves, which may take us many months to complete since we both work
full time and the insurance paid precious little for repairs.
Initiate Project Management…
From the moment we decided we had to do the work ourselves,
I set out to manage it like a project.
There was surely a scope, budget, resources to allocate… and best of
all: a flexible timeline. The question was how, exactly. Microsoft Project is too expensive to own as
an individual so I opened up my trusty Excel sheets and started outlining
tasks. For each task I listed sub-tasks
as needed and drilled down to materials.
I looked up prices on Lowes.com for each item on my list and viola, a
budget appeared for the rooms. I started
to understand why the contractors had run away so hastily.
At that point, I began to wonder if my excel sheet was
really practical for actually managing the task flow as we worked. It was better organized by room… but we may
not actually work that way. Wouldn’t we want
to paint all the walls before we put in the new flooring? I needed flexibility… and Kanban came to the
rescue.
My initial Kanban board was just a piece of paper with
teeny, tiny sticky notes on them. My
columns were something like “Waiting”, “Researching”, “Purchasing”, “Ready to
Do” and “In Progress”. Each area has its own color sticky note, so I
could easily see every task for a particular room. Some rooms have not been started at all, and
the whole room is on one sticky note in the “Waiting” column… my “project
horizon” that will later be segregated into parts.
I have to say that as I move those little sticky notes
around and finally onto the BACK of the paper to my “Completed” pile, I
actually feel that we were making progress.
It’s motivating. Sing it with me:
Buy Drywall & Mud, Hang Plastic, Hang Drywall, Tape and Mud, Sand, Scrape
The Popcorn Ceiling Off, Swear To Never Do Popcorn Ceilings Again, Fix The
Ceiling, Hang The Lights, Prime The Ceiling, Prime The Wall, Replace The
Cupboards, Reinstall The Countertop, Reinstall The Sink, Install The Dishwasher…
“HEY! THERE’S RUNNING WATER IN THE KITCHEN!! OMGTYLICBTTSL!”
We still have some more priming to do in the kitchen, but we
reaallly needed water back out there so we opted to prime just the wall where
it resided before doing the rest of the room.
I have no idea how long this is going to take us because
there seems to be so little time to make progress… but my little Kanban board
is always there, gently reminding me that there are at least 6 other rooms to
do once the kitchen is finished. God
help us.
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