I could count on two hands the number of times I've attempted some household job, particularly DIY, where something which on the surface shouldn't take too long and looked straightforward turned out to be the opposite. It doesn't mean I've not had some great results; the wooden floor I put into my old flat will most likely outlast me. It looked like a weekend's work but ended up being something like three or four swear-word-soaked weekends to get the whole project over the line.
I remember thinking, about halfway through, that I really wished I'd started with the right tools for the job, but also that perhaps I shouldn't have started at all, preferring to onboard a professional.
The second time a wooden floor needed to be laid, I went the professional route. It was done in no time and looked like a simple, effortless process.
Simplicity is both positive and a negative.
Aside from the fact that I'm not a carpenter, one of the things I've learned throughout my years is that you should try to reduce things back to the simplest possible outcome, made up of the smallest possible steps.
A Minimum Viable Product might spring to mind here, a concept in software development of trying to minimise the features and functions to get to some product people can use quickly. It reduces delivery risk because you're not biting off more than you can easily chew; think a slice of pizza versus trying to swallow a calzone in one go.
Minimum Viable Products vary in size. It's easy to think of what this might be for a wooden floor, the ability to walk on it without it being varnished or having those nice bits which stop you from tripping up or breaking a toe when the floor meets a door.
More tricky, then, is what is an MVP for a house. That it is watertight? That you can sleep in it because you can order delivery food and therefore don't need a kitchen?
Let's go even trickier, just to amp things up a bit; what is an MVP Wedding? There are some that would argue that it simply doesn't exist.
There is, then, an art to simplification. It sits on both sides—the definition of what you're going to do and the execution thereof.
It's hard to draw the line because you can get it wrong on both accounts. If you oversimplify what you're building, it could be that no one will use it because it has no tangible value; this counts as a failure. If you oversimplify the execution, you could end up as I did with my floor with a 3x multiplier in terms of how long it takes to deliver.
In the case of my wooden floor, this really wasn't a problem; other than the amount of sweat and tears I expended, only I was affected, and the satisfaction of having completed it was pay off enough.
Other cases are much more extreme; I can't imagine telling a customer that the job being undertaken will cost 300% more than the estimate. Well, I can imagine it; it would be some sort of mini-explosion followed by an industry-wide loss of credibility.
Aside from simply pointing the microscope at this complex, subjective and difficult area of finding the right balance, what else is worth considering? Here my wooden floor pops back up in terms of relevance. Professionals, someone who has done this before and has enough depth of experience to fully appreciate the complexity and simplicity of the job at hand, can be called in.
A common problem of deploying a professional is that dose of realism which exposes the exact size of the job. I expected my flooring job would take me, a complete amateur, one weekend. When a professional flops out a two-weekend estimate, it feels oversized; I'm expecting the same or less than my own estimate.
There are other dimensions to this, for example, quality; the professional is going to want to do the best job possible to avoid complaints or just plain grumpy customers spreading bad news messages about their workmanship.
Handily, when it comes to professionals, the shortcut to establishing the validity of effort and cost is to leverage your relationships. A trust recommendation of a professional, having done a good job for someone your respect, validates the effort and cost.
Circling back a bit, breaking down the job or task into much smaller tasks is handy; the smaller the task, the easier to estimate and the more accurate you will be. The act of laying a wooden floor, on first blush, probably doesn't include hoovering up, taking the odds and ends down the local rubbish dump and so on. This is also handy detail for the professional; you can start to trim costs by suggesting you will hoover or dispose of the rubbish.
In summary, your chances of success in any endeavour are going to be increased by simplifying. Aim low to begin with, learn and then move on to the next step will reduce risk and build in knowledge.
Break everything down into tasks and then try to decompose these further to give your noodle a chance to consider unconsidered side effects or related tasks which aren’t immediately obvious. Execution of the job or task builds in experience, but counterbalance this with the importance and risk, think about the benefits of learning through observation by employing a professional.
Simples.
Thanks for dropping by; apologies for the long pause between posts; life amped up around me and reduced my free time and agency to a small sliver which I decided to expend on sitting around doing not much at all. Anyway, friends, it’s a simple pleasure knowing you’re here; see you next time.