Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Summer Projects (Managing Renovations From Afar)
Summer is supposed to be for relaxing and unwinding, but every year we saddle ourselves with all kinds of projects: catch-up projects, time-consuming projects, stressful projects. Whether it’s putting together your photo albums or putting an addition on your home, the proper strategy can make you less stressed and more effective.
In out of Out of Chaos #27 I shared how I break my yearly photo-album project into tiny chunks that I manage to accomplish each summer. However daunting your task might be, you can break it down into tiny steps. Once you have a list of steps, put them in your calendar. It might seem dumb to put: choose paint color on your calendar for the day after Memorial Day, but believe me, scheduling makes it happen.
If your project includes other people, you are going to have to sync schedules. Don’t assume that just because your college-age kid is living at home for the summer they are going to have time to go through the basement with you. You have to book it to get commitment. Similarly, if you are working with contractors or handy-persons of any kind, get a timetable-and give yourself some wiggle-room. If step two is supposed to be done on July 7th, don’t schedule step three until the 14th. Trust me on that.
Just because it sounds like the ultimate luxury problem, managing any kind of renovation from afar is incredibly stressful. It doesn’t matter if you are putting shelves in your closet or gutting a Greenwich Village townhouse, whether you are in the Hamptons or your mother’s place in Jersey, if you aren’t on site you have to be doubly organized-and reachable.
Many of my clients have found old-fashioned accordian files to be useful for traveling with paint chips and blueprints. As much as we want to go paperless, home improvements still seem to create a lot of paper. Using a file-sharing program like Dropbox or Google Docs can really help streamline the paper, which is doubly important if you are traveling. More decorators and designers are using Pinterest as a way to avoid messy folders of pages ripped from magazines.
So book the time, try to go digital, but most importantly, remember there are really only eight weeks of summer. You can only do so much in eight weeks. Choose your projects wisely. Better to finish two than start ten and have them hanging over your head until Christmas.