There's nothing like a deadline to motivate me (and the wife) to really getting something done.
When we got the house we had a tight deadline to get the house ready for us to move into (it was "movein" ready for me, but not so much for the Executive) w/ our lease running up a week after closing. We got possession on a Friday and moved in the next Saturday (eight days). This by itself isn't that crazy of a situation. I'm sure people get possession of new homes everyday and move in shortly after. The wrench in this little scenario was threefold.
1. We didn't pack. At least not adequately enough to make it a smooth and painless adventure. I have come to the realization that it is much, much more important to have everything boxed up, labeled, and staged for the move than to have a crapload of people there to help you move a crapload of stuff that is in varying stages of use and being packed up.
The problem doesn't manifest itself in just the move but also in the unpacking process. When you don't systemically pack everything up and label what it is and where it goes you end up just throwing it wherever there is a patch of carpet or a flat box to stack another box. Once that happens its not even a slippery slope, it's a cliff and you've already fallen off and the landing isn't going to be a smooth one.
2. Our new home, like any home left vacant for a year, needed some freshening up. While the wife was extremely optimistic with how quickly we could plow through our list of needs and then dive into the realm of the areas we "wanted" to fix up before moving in, I tried to temper my doubts and resolved to just dig in and try and get as much done as we could.
Even this conservative approach proved to be too eager and ambitious. If we had of packed everything appropriately, if we had of left more than a week to do all of this (more on that next), if we knew what we were flipping doing, we still wouldn't have gotten everything done in a week.
It's a much better option to do things slowly and not try to multitask through everything at once. Easier said than done.
3. Leave your self the appropriate amount of time and then add a day or two for good measure. We tried to do this but failed horribly. We set ourselves a time frame and a list of things that we wanted to do and then shortened the time frame as more things came onto the list and life took over (jobs, packing, general exhaustion).
I know this isn't that surprising to probably a large number of people but it is amazing how long even the simplest of tasks can take. Painting. Throwing paint on a wall in a measured manner. Not so hard on paper is it? Real life? Quite the opposite, I've waited in the DMV for less time than it's taken me to paint a 10x10 room.
First you have to tape the room (watch a professional painter and you'll realize how slow you are), then you have to get out the paint, then you have to shake the sonofabitch until your arm hurts, then you have to get all the requisite tools and Lowe's created appendages. Now set everything up and finally, after all that prep work, you get to actually start changing the color of your walls. Lets just hope that your walls didn't need any touch up work because, crap, you have to fix those first too.
And this is just one thing we had to do (any almost every house bought will have this done). We painted almost the whole house, I ripped the main floors flooring and laid down new wood flooring, demoed the kitchen and main floor bathroom, redid those two rooms, turned our pond into a pool, built a bookshelf that spans a whole wall (!!!), and a whole bunch of small crap that only my wife or I will ever notice but had to be done.
All of this was done over the last month and a half and we had our last big push to get everything done last week because we threw a House Warming/Stock Our Bar/Pool party on Saturday (got some great whiskeys) and if we hadn't of thrown that shindig I don't know if we would have all of that done by now.
Don't do it that way. Set deadlines but make 'em realistic
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