“It’s not supposed to be this bad!”

Famous last words. The hubs and I have done a lot of DIY projects and work on our car/home, etc. I’ll try to remember to update this post to link to the various projects as I discuss them. We’ve changed the brakes on my car, installed new lighting on our stairs landing and dining room, updated our electrical outlets, updated our thermostate, planned and built our master closets, installed new toilets, installed garage shelves, and so on…to name a few things! Our rule of thumb is to double, maybe even triple, the estimate of how long any project will take, just in case we run into issues.

Disclaimer – my husband’s an engineer and project manager by profession, and I’m a project manager myself. We’re a family of spreadsheets, as the hubs says, but we’re willing and able to learn! My father-in-law is pretty handy and has passed on a lot of things to my husband, as well as being a great resource when we run into roadblocks on our projects. So, as a family of spreadsheets, we have spreadsheets of reserach before we start anything. Any time we need to buy parts, etc., a spreadsheet is created with the specs and costs so we can compare. There’s also a lot of Google research and YouTube video watching. Honestly, even when we hire someone to do a job, we still do a lot of research to make sure that the person we hired did it right and isn’t cutting corners.

Yet, with all that preparation, there’s always a point in time when I hear (after some cussing) the hubs go “IT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THIS BAD!” Because..sometimes there’s an extra difficult bolt in a car, or a badly installed item in the house from a previous owner, the thing you’re replacing is so old that you end up having to replace more than the part you’re updating, or you find holes to the outside that you need to patch (all of which has happened!). Regardless, let’s just say that a lot of projects took a lot longer than the double or triple timeframe we allotted ourselves.