Some crucial steps when preparing for your up-coming house project
For any endeavour in life, whether it’s marriage, a move or just an everyday task, there is one surefire way to ensure success from the outset, and that is by ensuring you do not miss out a vital step – preparation.
And the same is very much true for home improvement projects, but if you are like me, then this is the step that is most likely to be neglected, and from which all later trouble stems. I don’t know why, but some of us are just like that – we are raring to get going, chomping at the bit, so we go rushing into a project without having done some vital planning and preparation. The results can be disastrous, or at best less-than-stellar – and the thing with home improvement errors is that we have to live with them (literally!) for years down the road. Accidentally drilling through a water pipe is something that can be rectified relatively quickly but is an annoying and expensive mistake. On the other hand, badly-laid parquet flooring, or poorly hung doors will continue to irk us for many years and instead of enjoying our home we will feel a sense of disappointment whenever we see jobs that could have been done better – and that is hardly what we want!
So how do we prepare properly for that home improvement project, big or small? Here are some of the key things we need to have taken into consideration before we even start:
Planning the steps
As we plan the job we are about to undertake, we need to carefully visualize and write down or sketch the steps it will involve. We can do this in the form of a to-do list which we can then check off as we go. This will ensure a couple of things: a) we don’t miss anything b) we know which order we are going to do things in. It will also help us with the next step.
1. Materials
There is nothing worse than starting a job and then finding yourself having to go out to the shop to get something you forgot, or THOUGHT you already had. MUCH better to go out to the DIY centre with a list and buy everything at once – and probably cheaper, too, than buying it at the local shop.
2. Tools
Similarly, for those of us who tend to rush into jobs without adequate preparation it is not uncommon to discover that we are missing a vital tool without which we cannot continue the job and then have to beg, steal or borrow. Or worse, if you are like me, we try to botch the job with a tool which is not really up to the job (what, you’ve never tried to cut off some wood with a Stanley knife because you didn’t have a saw to hand?!)
3. Time
Ahhh, that most undervalued resource, the one we all-too-often do not factor in at all. MOST jobs will take longer than we thought – there will be unforeseen hitches and delays, and that ‘one evening’ we set aside can turn into two or three. And if we didn’t plan for extra time, the job gets left half-done and drags on for days and weeks, much to the annoyance of your fairer half (sound familiar?) So it is vital to plan a realistic time-frame for any work you undertake around the house so that you can do the job carefully and meticulously, without rushing.
Hopefully your next home improvement project will prove rather more a success than maybe past ones have, be it a project in the area of this or some other task. On a related note readers might also consider checking out this site.
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