Move-in Deadline Creates Pressure

This bathroom is undergoing a major remodel. Each step must be done at the right time to minimize cost and get the job done fast. Photo Credit: Tim Carter

Move-in or Remodeling Deadlines

DEAR TIM: My husband and I are weeks away from moving into our first fixer-upper home. We thought we could rehab it in five weeks and are now overwhelmed with unfinished work. Move-in day is three weeks away and our new baby is due in four months. We both work on the house every free moment we are not at our day jobs, but it seems nothing is getting done. What is the best strategy to adopt before we move into the home? Jobi L., Erlanger, KY

DEAR JOBI: Your dilemma makes me feel as if I just exited a time machine. The exact same thing happened to my wife and I with our first home sans the baby complication. Almost 30 years ago, Kathy and I purchased an FHA repossessed home whose gaping hole in the roof over the master bedroom made it appear as if it had been a victim of a WWII bombing raid. I thought that three months of full-time work on the house with myself and two helpers would allow me to move into a totally rehabbed home. My math was way off. The three months turned into six months!

How do you calculate deadlines?

The first thing I would recommend is to stop for a few hours and regroup. Your situation can and should be approached as any mathematical problem. You have a crisp deadline just ahead and can probably calculate a realistic amount of time you both can work on the house between now and the move-in date. Do that calculation and be conservative in your calculations.

As soon as you finish that calculation, stop and think back about some of the tasks you have recently completed. Try to accurately determine the amount of time you spent patching plaster or painting a particular room. Think back to the amount of time it actually takes to paint a window from start to finish. These task times allow you to project how much time is required to complete a multi-faceted job with a respectable degree of accuracy.

Make an unfinished job list

It is now time to make the unfinished job list. Go into each room and make a detailed list of each task that must be done. A typical list might include: strip wallpaper from walls, wash down walls, ceiling and woodwork, patch walls, pick up materials, sand and dust walls and woodwork, paints walls and ceilings, paint windows and woodwork, clean tools, refinish floor, etc. Do this for each and every room and don't forget closets, hallways and staircases. Next to each task assign a realistic amount of time it will take you to complete that job.

How many hours a week can be spend working on the project?

There is no doubt in my mind you will quickly discover that you and your husband combined can probably devote no more than 100 hours of work per week to the home. Many of these hours will be not be as productive as you might like since you will be working close to 14 hours per day. My instincts tell me that when you total the amount of hours you need to work to complete every unfinished task in the house, it will be hundreds of hours more work than you have time before the critical move-in day arrives.

Prioritize your tasks

It is now time to prioritize tasks. In my case, Kathy and I decided it was very important to have our master bedroom finished as well as the bathroom. We didn't want to go to work each day in dust-covered clothes, although for me it was an option. You must decide which rooms are the most important to finish and begin to focus all efforts on those rooms.

It is very important to make sure that you keep in mind what needs to happen to finish all tasks. For example, it would not be prudent to finish the kitchen if you discover three months from now you must remove its ceiling to replace the plumbing in the bathroom above. The time spent thinking about how tasks relate to one another will save you time and money as you progress with this ambitious house renovation job.

Be cautious around materials that can product harmful fumes!

I also urge you to consult your doctor. You need to protect your health and that of your unborn child. Some of the building materials you are working with may produce harmful fumes or by-products as they dry and cure. The existing home may have significant amounts of lead paint on the walls and woodwork. Old varnished woodwork can also contain lead. Sanding these surfaces can produce toxic amounts of lead dust that can have serious and permanent health affects.

Is it easy to underestimate the time needed for remodeling?

Underestimating the amount of time it takes to complete remodeling jobs is a very common rookie mistake. The lack of hands-on experience and professional tools, the inability to properly plan the staging of tasks and some poor quality advice found in home improvement television shows is partially to blame. Add to this the cumulative stress of fatigue and pressure from a looming deadline and the ingredients for a disaster are ready to be blended together.

It takes years of full-time hands-on experience to master certain tasks. If a person with no experience thinks they can install ceramic tile as fast and as accurately as a true professional, they are dreaming. Each craft has hundreds of small tricks that professions employ each time they are faced with a different situation. Add to this the constraints of materials that need to properly cure and dry before the next step happens and one can see why it takes weeks to do something instead of hours or days.