Manversation

The “Get ‘er Done” Formula

I once heard from a friend that when attempting some sort of a project that involves physical labor such as painting a house, remodeling a kitchen, tiling a bathroom etc., you should take the amount of time you think it’s going to take you, go to the next unit of time measurement up from there, double it, and you will have a reasonable estimate of how much time the project will actually take you to complete.

For example, you’re getting ready to tile your bathroom. You think it will probably take, oh about a day. Wrong! According to this formula, go to the next time interval up (1 week) and double it to get your more realistic estimate of two weeks.

Unfortunately, this formula proved itself true with one of my most recent projects which was painting my house. I had taken a week off work to do it, and the project wound up stretching over several weekends beyond that week until it had actually taken me close to two months start to finish.

Although this formula is probably especially apt for amateur DIY types, especially when trying something new for the first time, the friend who first told me about it has worked for the last several years as the foreman of a house framing crew and now owns his own home remoldeling business and he assured me with several amusing anecdotes that being a professional didn’t necessarily exempt him from the effects of this formula all the time.

The Home Depot Hypothesis

It also seems like for any home improvement project, one trip to Home Depot is never enough. Just when you think you have all the materials you need, you realize you forgot some small (but crucial) part and it’s off to the store again!

In the spirit of the good fun of the “Get ‘er Done” formula, I have devised my own Home Depot Hypothesis. First, in order to scale the formula to people of different incomes or spending levels, you will need to find the amount of money you are typically comfortable spending on food, gas, and discretionary items in a week. For people who get spending money out of the ATM every week, that would be your weekly figure. Maybe you put everything on a credit card. Well, go find that last statement and look at how much you charge on food, gas and discretionary items like going out to eat, going to movies etc. It doesn’t matter how you arrive at this figure, just get close to a rough estimate of how much you spend in a typical week.

Next, estimate the cost of your project and divide it by your weekly “comfortable spending” figure. This will yield the approximate number of trips to Home Depot or a similar store it will take to get all of your materials throughout the course of the project… Of course, this implies that you can accurately estimate the amount you are going to spend on the project and that is a whole other problem, so this really turns into kind of a ‘chicken and egg’ exercise.

I sincerely wish you better luck than these two formulas would suggest on your next home improvement project!

Risky looking home improvement project photo by eelke dekker