With all these projects currently going on around the farm it’s easy to get lost in the process. We decided to prove how big of a geek we are and installed Microsoft Project to keep track of everything. This might be a bit of an overkill, but you can’t beat the features this software has when trying to keep track of little tasks and errands.
Having never done a project like this before, one feature we are really happy to have is the easy scheduling of different tasks, and being able to move them around to fit different steps together so delays can be kept to a minimum.
We just updated the project today, to see how our progress is coming along and do some minor adjustments on time estimates – the grand total comes out to 57 working days – December 18th. That would be fantastic as it still includes almost a week off over thanksgiving to host a thanksgiving dinner and get all the Christmas decorations done.
However, since we noticed that we are grossly overestimating how long we take to complete certain projects we have also done a “stress test” to get a blue sky scenario for the build out of both, the mudroom and the guest house and it comes out to 43 days. Wow, that would be November 18th and still includes the original estimate of 10 days for building furniture and decorating.
Somehow, after discussing the stress test it doesn’t seem so unrealistic. We might be crazy but so far our projects are moving along more swiftly than we had thought. While we are still at the beginning of this journey, we have run into some complications (the safety glass for example) we are still 3 days ahead of the original schedule.
Tomorrow is another day, and there once again is about a million things on our to do list. We’ll see how we feel about our scheduling after that.
