What Steps Happen When?

In other words, my unending frustration with being confused

My profession is project management. I identify projects, steps, checklists, accomplishments, tasks, risks, opportunities, contingencies, dependencies and stakeholders in areas of my life some people find excessive. I can’t help it! I see order, priority, and options everywhere! I love calming chaos.

You might think this is a good quality in the aftermath of a house fire. I suppose it could be … but the problem is that I’ve also been doing this for 20 years and I have lots of tools in my toolbox, lots of ideas of how to organize things. Let’s just say that not everyone has that same … skill set.

Our construction job has a project manager, or maybe a few? If you’re reading this and this happened to you let me know. There is a construction manager, an on-site project manager, and then some kind of other project manager who handles the cleaning and storage of our contents. Three “PMs,” all with different skill sets and ways of working, plus me. What could go wrong?!

I told the guys I am a PM the first week we met, and I apologized in advance if I get too nitpicky. (I’m hard on myself, but probably not actually that fussy.) I asked for a Gantt chart of the steps that happen in a full demolition and rebuild. When I asked for this, I got a bit of a blank stare. Example of a Gantt chart:

The steps are in a column and the dates are across the top, so there’s a visual flow of what happens when. I said I’d even settle for a list of what the steps are and in what order. I’ve never built a house and certainly never had a natural disaster at my house, so I have no idea what is supposed to happen. I’m also married to a project-management-minded person who tracks percent of completion in his finance job.

Let’s say I’ve had to adjust my expectations. I think my contractors are doing things in the order they are supposed to happen—this is what they do for a living and I do trust them—but I am used to a) running the show/holding people accountable to a timeline and tasks that have been agreed to and b) communicating about status constantly.

Our contractors use an app that they’re pretty good about updating nearly daily. There are pictures of progress and notes about what is happening on a given day: this is awesome. I got all excited because there was a tab in the app for “schedule.” This turned out to be quite disappointing, though. A schedule was pre-loaded in, and it showed in a calendar view, but it said that we should be back in the house by about 9 months. We are quickly approaching 9 months and I wish I had never seen that pre-loaded schedule that was probably just an estimate. It never got updated.

Since this has driven me absolutely nuts to not know what would happen in what order and what was dependent on something else, I’m going to share here what actually happened. Your results may vary, but this is a resource I wanted desperately and just never got so I hope it can help someone else. I can’t say how long each of these things takes because of contractor availability, weather, materials availability, permits, etc., but this was the order in which it happened. Items with an asterisk were dependent on the insurance company, and some things happened in parallel, other things had to be in order.

Right now we are around steps 22-23 and we were told we have about 7 weeks to go. We shall see.

My advice to you if you are going through a complete rebuild is to ask repeatedly for a list of what steps need to be done, even if contractors won’t commit to dates. It would have helped me quite a bit to be able to check things off a list.