Our preparations for moving to Kentucky are a good example of how we balance the need to plan ahead with the need to respond to the moment. We were able to buy the house there without first selling the house here, and we don’t want to relocate our household until we have a contract on the house here, so we have the opportunity to spend some time working on the new house before moving into it.
Much of the work we’d like done is the kind we used to pay someone else to do, but we’re trying to put that attitude behind us, so we’ve been fairly ambitious about deciding to complete some major projects on our own. Briefly: three of the bedroom closets are unuseable, so those need to be taken out and larger ones need to be built; the ceilings need to be textured and painted upstairs and down; the downstairs needs wallpapering; the kitchen walls need repainting; the mudroom walls and upstairs walls need to be textured and painted; the mudroom needs a vinyl tile floor put in; the upstairs needs 1600 square feet of hardwood floor laid, doors hung, and door and window trim installed. There are other jobs we’d like to do as well, but those are the ones we’d like to do before we move in.
We allowed the current owners a month to move out after buying the house, so we’ve had a month to think about these jobs. None of them are jobs I’ve ever done before, so I had to read up on them all just to be sure that I could likely get them done. Then I had to figure out which tools we needed for each job, and whether to buy them or rent them. I began to think about what order would be best to do the jobs in, and what sort of preparations would be needed for each one (picking up or taking delivery of materials, preparing the work site, reserving the rented tools). I thought about roughly how much time it would take to complete each one, and how to fit those jobs into a summer calendar which was already checkerboarded with other commitments of various importance.
As we’ve waited to get started, a plan has gradually evolved, but not a detailed written plan, and not as a result of sitting down and carefully planning each detail out. Rather, I have taken spare time here and there to go over the project again in my mind, thinking out this or that portion in a little more detail, doing research online or in my growing collection of how-to books, getting confident that I know how to handle a particular part of the project from start to finish.
The result is less like a specific plan and more like a set of pictures in my mind of what I will be doing during any given phase of the project, e.g. when it is time to texture and paint Chris and I will spend a lot of time covering every surface we don’t want textured or painted, then going to the rental store for a texture gun, getting some instructions on how to use it, spending as long as it takes (hopefully a day, maybe two) spraying the ceilings and upstairs walls, then returning the gun and getting a paint sprayer, then spending as long as it takes (hopefully a day, maybe two) to paint it all, etc.
I won’t have a particular job planned out in very much detail until just before I have to do it, in order to maintain as much flexibility as possible. I will have a rough idea of what materials I will acquire where. Just before it is time to texture and paint, I will sit down and think through each step of the job, making a list of all the things I can think of that we will need to have to do it, and then figuring out how and when we will go about getting them.
It isn’t worth it to me to plan things out beyond a certain level of detail, because there are too many unknowns. For example, I don’t know if texturing or painting will be difficult or easy or somewhere in between. I don’t know what sorts of disasters are likely to occur, and how much extra time they would add to the schedule. I don’t know what other things might come up in our life which would push us to break texturing and painting into jobs done on different trips, or whether it might end up necessary to do the jobs in a different order, even though it would be much less convenient.
As with the CD recording project, my detailed planning is reserved for tasks that are immediately ahead and of relatively short duration. At the same time, I am constantly thinking and re-thinking the overall project, reviewing my rough understanding of what I will be doing when, and adjusting it as circumstances change throughout the project. I can plan like this because I am not setting specific, time-bound goals and then working to reach them, but because I am trying to move as effectively as possible in a certain direction. We want all the work on the above list to be completed, doing it ourselves if possible. We would like to get as much of it completed before we move in. We are prepared for unexpected things to happen, and we will deal with them as they come, and adjust our hopes and expectations accordingly.
