This is the story of a friend of mine who decided to handle the project management of her bathroom remodel all by herself. She is a teacher and is well organised. She also has more time to be at home than most of us so she was well placed to handle the project, or so she thought.
My friend did a good job preparing for the project. She made sure that she had decided exactly what would be going into the bathroom and how it was going to fit. She made drawings of the new bathroom design on graph paper square from all angles so that they could be used in discussions with contractors and to make sure that everyone knew exactly what they were doing.
Listing the jobs to be done in the bathroom remodel.
My friend managed to identify all the tasks that would have to be done before her new bathroom was finished. Her list included some or all of the jobs below.
* Rip out existing bathroom fixtures.
* Legal requirements compliance.
* Design and styling of the bathroom.
* Walls, widows and other building tasks.
* Interior walls finishing.
* Install plumbing.
* Install electrical appliances and wiring.
* New bathroom fixtures fitting.
* Wall tiling.
* Flooring.
* Remedial work.
Now consider the list of skills that she needed for the bathroom remodel.
Skills wanted for bathroom remodel
* Plasterer
* Electrician
* Carpenter
* Glazier
* Builder
* Flooring specialist
* Plumber
She could see from this that she would have her work cut out for her just phoning around for a couple of days. She used the phone book and the Internet to look for suitable workers to do the job. Then she visited her local bathroom showrooms and asked the staff if they could recommend anyone. This strategy turned out to be the best way to find good people to do the job as often the staff had personal contact with the contractors. She also obtained a few leads from friends who had recently remodeled their bathrooms.
The project management starts
She now had to make a plan of what needed to be done when and arrange for the right people to be available to carry out the tasks at the right time. This turned out to be a lot harder than you might imagine with so many people involved. They all seemed to have something else to do at the times when my friend wanted them to work for her. Because she was a teacher she tried to arrange for it all to happen in the school holidays so that she would have time to supervise but this only made the planning more difficult.
In the end she came up with a plan that everyone was happy with and she congratulated herself for a job well done. Little did she know what was to come.
Let the problems commence
The Fitters stripped out the old bathroom furniture on time but the delivery of the new fixtures was delayed. The workers turned up on time to fit the new stuff but they had to be sent away and asked to come back when the delivery turned up. This had a knock on effect with the remainder of the project plan for the bathroom remodel and threw my friends carefully laid out plan into disarray.
Project management is much more difficult than it seems
That was just the start of the saga. It seemed that everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. The wrong toilet turned up, it was too big and the wrong colour. The vanity lights were faulty, the shower doors didn't meet and the plumbing leaked. My friend was almost in tears a number of times.
It seemed like there was no end to it in sight, the original 10 day project turned into 12 weeks and it still wasn't quite complete then. I don't think that my friend will be doing this kind of thing again very soon.
Get someone else to manage your project for you
If you've never been involved with project management before then think twice about managing the project yourself. Ask yourself whether you have the required skills, loads of time and have lots of enthusiasm. If you don't have all of these then you should consider hiring a project manager to plan and control your bathroom-remodeling project. If you still want to do something to help then pick a task that you feel confident in handling like painting the ceiling.
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