Tuesday, January 15, 2019

How Much Time Did I Spend building?


By one measure, it took me 2 years plus a week to build the house from breaking ground (July 8, 2015) to moving in July 15, 2017.  Of course, the house wasn’t 100% done when I moved in, and I have been picking away at interior trim, shelving, coat hooks, etc. in between work, travel, and other projects. 

In any case, I wanted to tally up the amount of time I spent working on the house thus far.  Sure, it’s not the complete picture, so I suppose I’ll have to come back to this discussion when I’ve completed all the major tasks.  So the big number is… 
1,572 hours!  
If I’d been working 40 hours a week, that comes out to 39.3 weeks or 9.4 months.  That’s also about 70% of the total time spent building the house if you total up all the time I paid for contractors to do their thing (694.5 person-hours). 

If you’re interested in drilling down into those numbers, check out the table for a breakdown of that time by task, and I’ll try to put these into context:

·       I would consider myself to be semi-skilled labor.  I accomplished most tasks to a contractor-level of quality, without many mistakes, but I am certainly much slower than a professional.
·       I was not able to work a “full day” most of the time.  That leads to inefficiencies because it’s harder to maintain an efficient rhythm, and if you have the same setup/cleanup time whether you work 4 hours or 9, you get less accomplished working a partial day.
·       On average, I worked 5 hours on the days I made it to the house, but that varied from half an hour to 14.5 hours on the longest day.  During the build, I was working between ½ and ¾ time at my “real” job of civil engineering, so that limited and broke up the time I spent at the Practice House.  For better or worse, civil engineering was the #1 priority and the Practice House was #2.
·       The percentage of time listed in the chart is based on the combination of my time and the contractors’.  You can get a sense that I did most of the natural building tasks, and the contractors did most of the conventional construction tasks.
·       There is a hefty dose of my learning curve involved in my numbers.  In particular, I spent way more time than I should have fixing cracks in the first two layers of adobe floor because I didn’t get my clay/sand ratio right.
·       I also wasn’t sure of what level of finish I would be comfortable with.  For example, I spent considerable time on the finish coats of plaster, making them as flat and uniform as my patience would allow. At the time, I was a little frustrated that they still seemed wavy and rough.  But after stepping back and now living in the place, I think they look fantastic!  I probably could have cut my time in half on the final layers in retrospect if I’d known that the material is so forgiving of a rustic look and that I would enjoy the result.

One major caveat is that I’m still not “done”.  The biggest pending project is to enclose the front porch with screened panels in summer, and clear acrylic panels in the winter.  This will be a significant improvement to the use and functionality of the house, so I plan to revisit these numbers once the porch is finished.

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