Saturday, August 13, 2016

Auditing my time to become more efficient

I decided to evaluate my time and over the course of a month, I noted all my renovation activities on a calendar. In a way, it was an audit of my time spent working on the house.

What I discovered, was that I was dedicating roughly 2 hours each night to setup and cleanup. Indeed, one of the most time consuming tasks has been the time it takes to lug out and set up the tools.

What if I could dedicate those 2 hours to making actual progress on the house?
What steps must I take to accomplish this?


The solution was simple.

I needed a dedicated workspace where all my tools were set up and ready to use on demand. The workspace needed to be easy to clean so that dust wouldn't escape into the house.

But where? The smurf room. That blue room that had yet to find a dedicated purpose. Better yet, the floors in it were trashed by cellar fungus. Half of them were already missing, a quarter unsalvageable, and 1/4 still viable. I decided to use the floors from this room to patch the hallway and bedroom floors.  In order to cover up the exposed subfloor, I'd need to take the vinyl flooring from the bedroom.

To keep myself on track, I made a list of tasks:

  1. Remove the hardwoods from the smurf room
  2. Treat the subfloor with fungicide. Let it dry. Plane it flat.
  3. Pull all the nails out of the woods, treat them with fungicide, and trim off the bad parts.
  4. Remove the vinyl flooring from the bedroom (layer #1)
  5. Reinstall it in the smurf room.
  6. Set up the workshop (in the smurf room)
  7. Remove layer #2 sticky tiles and plywood floors from the bedroom
  8. Scrape the bedroom floors of layer #3 - sheet linoleum.
  9. Remove layer #4 - the bedroom hardwoods, 
  10. which requires demo'ing out the corner TV hutch and all the baseboards.
  11. Finish removing the bedroom hardwoods,
  12. Treat the subfloor with fungicide, let it dry, then plane it flat.
  13. Pull all the nails out of the woods, treat them with fungicide, and trim off the bad parts.
  14. Cut subfloor away from where it touches the chimney masonry to prevent future wood destroying fungi
  15. Reinstall hardwoods in the bedroom, patching it with the salvaged woods from the smurf room
  16. Finish installing remaining scraps in hallway and, with some luck, the kitchen too.
  17. Have a really stiff drink. 
Currently I'm on step #11, which means the new workshop in the smurf room is all set up!!!




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