Renovation decisions

The last couple of months I have experienced what it is like to renovate an appartment. This sounds like it is finished but I believe I will enjoy the experience for a couple of more months.
One of things I found is that the Dutch construction market is so intransparant that builders can differ over 70% in total pricing of a job. That led to me doing most of the work on the house so far leaving only the things I really can't do to contractors.

It has also taught me that most things that seem simple in my mind are quite hard to bring to practice. After some attempts I got the hang most of it though.

So today we went to buy new flooring. It took us 2 hours to decide between 2 colors. And after deciding on the colors there were decisions like, do we want a smooth floor or with a wood profile, do we like the boards to be tight or should that have a slightly curved side? The deeper you go the more options you see until you get to a level that doesn't matter to you anymore. It easily connects me to my professional life.

Over the years I found that project principals always know what they want on a certain level of detail. When you move a level deeper into the subject though, all kind of new decisions arise, most of them completely new to the principal and his team. My floor cost substantially less then most of the projects I have led so it doesn't surprise me that it takes a little more than 2 hours to get through all the details on them. But I am going to look at that floor for a long time though, might be longer than the lifetime of my projects. Still I slightly pushed the decision today like I do at work sometimes to make sure the discussion keeps the energy it needs to come to great solutions. At work that is usually no problem. But this is for our own house. So were we too fast on choosing a floor today? I believe not but my girlfriend had second thoughts in the car.

Carrying this thought I looked back at the renovation. So far we have only tackled technical issues. I moved the central heating and hot water systems, had all the pipes hidden under the floor and removed the pipes and other infrastructure items from our walls. I have brushed up the window frames and installed mechanical ventilation. On top of that I had one room rendered and I painted that afterwards. All these steps were technical, some of them close to home engineering. That was actually the level we normally don't care about as long as it works. It has taken a lot of time and some hard choices though.
Now we are getting to the level we do care about / understand fully. That's where we can grasp the effect of our decisions more. So now it takes us more time to agree on what we want, what we think is best for the house and what will give us the best rate of return.

On top of that we have a rapidly a depleting budget for the renovation so we also need to be smart with the money. Keeping all this in mind, I have learned a lot about my principals by doing this renovation. Key things for today:

• Take your principal to the level they care about / understand most and make sure you get all wishes and requirements clear on that level.
• Make sure that the deeper levels add up to the principal level requirements / wishes.
• Know the principals budget before you start the conversation on his wishes, saves you a lot of time.
• Get your suppliers to tell you what the global idea would cost in a couple of scenario's so that you can challenge your principal.
• If you are the principal, let your executive / project leader do these things on his own. If you have too much of an idea on what you would like to have on the wrong level of detail (too deep usually) you stop creativity at that level.
• Oh and last, have fun with all these choices and decisions, otherwise it will be drag.