Home: Scope Creep

14:00:00

Its been a long time. So much has changed in my house since I last posted. Im still trying to keep things in a vague chronological order. Instagram has many, many spoilers of where we are at currently, though!

Today I wanted to talk about scope creep. I spent a year or so working with a business change team made up of project managers and programme managers and the like. A lovely bunch of folk. And one of the things I learned was, when you undertake any change, you need to define the scope of your change project first and stick to it, like glue otherwise you will fall victim to scope creep and you suddenly end up having to change the whole world. Unfortunately, this is clearly not a skill I developed personally from my time there. Perhaps I should have asked one of my lovely colleagues to help me plan all this house stuff out! My house could probably be some case study for project managers in training of just how bad scope creep can be. Seriously, PRINCE2 trainers, get in touch and I'll talk you through it and you can laugh and laugh and laugh and build it into your training courses. You're welcome!


In my last post I said that the plan back in May 2015 was to change the system boiler for a combi boiler. This would let us put in a new bathroom with a shower - once we got the big water tank out of the small bathroom, there would be space to put a shower in. Once these two things were done, we'd move in and put up with everything else and sort it when we could. We were never supposed to paint the house or rip the carpets up but that became essential to making the house feel clean, as cleaning didn't cut it. The downstairs had laminate flooring in the front room and dining room. I really don't like laminate floors. Maybe because my only experience has been in rented houses where it'll be the cheapest flooring imagineable, but its just not for me. I'm a carpets kind of girl. We all have our differences! We reasoned that we'd keep the laminate for the time being at first. We'd noticed that an area of the dining room floor right by the back door was springy when we walked on it. I wondered if maybe there was a hole in the floorboard. We decided we'd take the laminate up.

We took the laminate up in the front room first and were really pleasantly surprise by what we found. The boards were in good shape, someone had sanded and stained them at some point and they looked reasomably good. Hurrah!
Blog photos
Blog photos
Blog photos

The next day, we took up the laminate in the dining room. Sadly, our luck ran out in there. That springy bit of floor turned out to be a huge damp patch in the floor, with a hole in the floorboards where they had just rotted through. There were two patches like this, one by the door and one near the entrance to the kitchen, where we had recently put a giant american style fridge freezer when we pulled it out of the kitchen to give us more space to clean in there. Eeeek! The smell of damp was pretty much awful and I remember being terrified - this looked really major and this was not something my trusty cleaning products or massive tub of magnolia could fix.

Blog photos
Blog photos
Blog photos

We'd found some woodworm upstairs on a couple of floorboards and after some bad rainfall the area below the front window, above the window seat developed wet patches on the walls. The inside of the window seat smelled damp too.

Its not really a spoiler to tell you that the central heating and bathroom refurb were then joined by timber and damp-proofing works. From there, it snowballed. We then ended up doing (deep breath!): structural works in the kitchen and putting a whole new set of units in, boarded the dining room ceiling and had the whole room re-skimmed, fixed damaged chimney pots and replaced all the soffits, fascias and guttering, fitted a new back door along with kitchen and bathroom windows, replaced all the doors upstairs with new architrave and new skirtings in the hallway and fitted new carpets to the whole of the upstairs. And it didn't end there, either!

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