Home Projects: A convenient 5-Step Process to Planning and Prioritizing
Owning a home and maintaining it can be very stressful. Having two homes to maintain can be outright overwhelming! Imagine adding to that the joy of home projects.
To manage our two homes, we use a simple 5-step process that works. We systematically follow this reliable guide when planning and prioritizing home projects.
Your goal can be home improvement projects or DIY home projects. It doesn’t matter, this process will help you.
The 5-Step Process
This well-established process guides all Registered Nurses when caring for their patients. I used it all the time in the years I practiced nursing at the bedside.
Now I work in academia and I still use it because it’s applicable to practically every situation. This useful framework is based on the fundamental principles of critical thinking and goal-oriented tasks.
Quite simply, it’s called the Nursing Process. The acronym is ADPIE. I didn’t create it but I often apply it to my day to day non-nursing activities.
This process includes:
- Assessment: collect enough information about a problem to make informed decisions
- Diagnosis: identify risk factors related to the problem and determine priorities
- Planning: create goals and outcomes
- Implementation: act toward achieving those goals and outcomes
- Evaluation: reassess the process to see if we’ve achieved the desired outcomes and what we may need to do to get back on track
Since I went to nursing school a very long time ago, the Nursing Process has gone through some variations. But the simple formula reflects the core of the process, a process that is transferable to a lot of situations.
This post demonstrates how to use this simple guide for non-nursing activities such as planning and prioritizing home projects.
It is a quick summary and in no way replaces what a nursing student needs to learn about the Nursing Process.
Assessment
The Assessment step includes “information gathering,” “collecting the facts,” and “listing assumptions.”
People do this all the time whether consciously or subconsciously. We size people up, make judgements, criticize. If we’re not careful, we jump to conclusions prematurely without having truly gathered all the needed information to make informed decisions.
Can you see how Assessment is a step that you can easily skip if you’re in a hurry to solve a problem? Or it’s a step you may wish to purposely overlook if you don’t want to face certain realities that need to be addressed? Skipping this phase could be detrimental to the outcomes of your project and bank account.
Obviously dire situations demand you to go straight into action. These usually pertain to safety hazards that could be dangerous if not addressed immediately.
This extreme example illustrates the point. If you are trying to escape a burning building and find an injured person, you wouldn’t stop to do a full “head to toe” assessment on the person. You wouldn’t take vital signs for the sake of going through the motions of the process.
The circumstances dictate you grab that person and run for your life. You go straight to the implementation step. The house is burning. The situation is dangerous. You must escape now!
But with these home improvement projects, we’re talking about siding repair or bolstering some garage ceiling joists. Depending on what you and your family see as important, there could be urgency in getting both projects done. But neither project is an emergency.
Diagnosis
In nursing, this step is the nurse’s clinical judgment about the client’s response to an actual or potential health need. It’s the basis of nursing care.
We are not talking about a client’s health condition. This post is about the needs of either the house or the cottage so we will modify things a bit.
Here is how we have simplified our judgment of the risk factors related to the problem and the priority needs. We classify projects in order of priority under these four main categories:
- Safety: demands immediate attention so no one gets hurt
- Winterization: requires immediate attention in the autumn months; seasonal
- Optimization: would need attention at some point; not time-sensitive
- Beautification: does not require attention but depending on your personal goal and budget, is a nice to have; may increase the value of your home
Planning
This step is where we plan a course of action and create measurable and realistic goals. The goals could be short-term and long-term.
It’s a critical step in home projects. There are different components to remember to include. The planning needs to incorporate resources such as money, time, availability of contractors. It also needs to address the sequence of problems according to priority.
I cannot stress enough the importance of including the budget planning in this phase. The costs must be monitored closely to ensure the spending is aligned with the goals and desired outcomes. Even if your goal includes a simple DIY home project, budget planning is always a good idea.
Implementation
We’re finally ready to spring into action because we’ve gone through the first three steps, Assessment, Diagnosis, and Planning.
All the important information pieced together give us the problem we need to solve along with the risk factors, and priorities. We’ve also thoughtfully planned how we are going to solve the identified problem.
In this step, we put our plan into effect.
If we followed the first three steps of this process, the majority of what occurs during this step will be expected, even unforeseen challenges. Why? Because during the planning phase, we would have planned for contingencies and a buffer to the budget. Big home improvement projects are notorious for having extra costs of labor or material.
Evaluation
We should be evaluating throughout the process even if it is sequentially the final step. We don’t want to wait until we complete a project in its entirety to address a problem we could have caught earlier on.
But when we do complete the project, this step is vitally important to understand a few things. Have we met our intended outcomes and achieved our goals with the home project? What have we learned from our missteps? Coming up with the answer to these questions will prevent us from possibly repeating costly mistakes in the future.
How We Translate this Process to Home Projects
The amount of money allocated to our Home Projects Savings Fund dictates the number of projects we tackle over a period of time. It also helps us to see how much we need to scale down. So often we start with the amount of money available to us.
For the sake of this example, let’s say we had enough funds for us to do one project at a time comfortably. We would have zeroed out our fund if we tried to do both in the same season. That’s something we never want to do in case we have emergency home repairs to make in the future.
We always try to leave a cushion in our Home Projects Savings Fund. So we need to make wise decisions to manage the funds and address the most pressing home repair problem.
Let me show you how we can apply this process when prioritizing which home project to do first and planning how to execute both projects eventually.
- City Home Project: Retrofit our attached garage to make it more usable and safe to use.
- Mountain Cottage Project: Replace and patch up damaged siding from woodpeckers drilling holes into it and stuffing the holes with acorns.
Follow along and you will discover that this Simple 5-Step Process is the guide you need when planning and prioritizing your own home projects.
The Home Project: Retrofit our attached garage to make it more usable and safe to use
Assessment
- Background: This project has been on our list for about a year.
- Safety: The garage is currently safe to use, but we’d like to reinforce the ceiling joists so we can use the attic space.
Diagnose:
- Implications: If we don’t do this project now, we will continue using the garage primarily for storage, not to house a car
- Classification: Of the four categories we use to classify projects, it falls under Optimization.
- It’s important but not urgent.
Plan:
- Keep it on the list of projects
- Set long-term goal to do the project the Autumn of the following year
- Calculate the funds needed to complete the project. Divide it by the number of months until the estimated project date. Set aside that amount each month until we’ve reached our budgeted savings goal to complete the project
- For example, if the job will cost $1,000 and we have 10 months until the estimated project date, we divide $1,000 by 10. Our monthly savings goal is to put away $100 each month in our Home Project Savings Fund. It’s important to dedicate these funds to the garage project or we will be putting it off again.
- Is $100 doable? If no, we need to adjust our savings goal to a more realistic one and delay the project accordingly.
Implementation:
- Rearrange the contents of the garage to ensure maximum usage and safety (get rid of things accumulated and organize remaining items)
- Budget the amount needed every month to achieve the savings goal to complete the project; track our progress
- Monitor the continued safety and efficient usage of the garage until it’s time to do the project
Evaluation:
- Evaluate the budget each quarter to determine if we’ve reached the goal earlier and can possibly start the work earlier.
- Check each quarter if the rearranged items in the garage continue to be safe and that we are still efficiently using the space.
Much of what we are evaluating will be to ensure maximum usage and safety.
The Cottage Project: Replace and patch up damaged siding from woodpeckers drilling holes into it and stuffing the holes with acorns
Assessment:
- Background: This is a project that just recently made the list with the purchase of the cottage.
- Safety: The cottage is currently safe to use, but we’d like to feel reassured the house is sealed for the winter; we’d also like to reclaim the cottage from the woodpeckers.
Diagnose:
- Implications: If we don’t do this project now, we will go through the winter worrying about potential water damage inside the house from all the holes and damaged areas (in the event of a wet winter); we would also allow the woodpeckers to continue using the cottage as an acorn granary–not good.
- Classification: Of the four categories we use to classify projects, it falls under Winterization.
- It’s both important and urgent. This project takes priority.
Plan:
- Secure contractor prior to the winter season.
- Set a short-term goal that by Thanksgiving weekend, the damaged siding will be replaced and smaller holes will be patched.
- Calculate the funds to see if we can save some money. For example, are there things we can do on our own such as paint the trim on the lower levels of the house not requiring scaffolding? If so, what is the return on our investment? Is the saving worth our time and effort?
Implementation:
- Monitor the work that it remains on budget and schedule.
- Document the work being done by taking pictures and videos of various stages.
Evaluation:
Ask questions similar to the following:
- Did we stay within budget, keeping extra costs down?
- What could we have done to better anticipate issues that required extra resources such as time and material (which means more money)?
- How did we do with taking timely action and making decisions when unforeseen issues arose?
- What are any lessons we learned that we can apply or avoid for the next home or cottage project?
Getting It Done
As you can see, we didn’t completely abandon one home project for the other. We scaled down considerably on one project. Then we planned for it in the future while we concentrated on the priority project.
Undertaking sizable home projects is stressful no matter how you look at it. At least it is for us. We have demanding jobs, a family to raise, and many activities in our life to juggle.
When we sit down to review all the different steps of the process, it takes out the “overwhelm” part of planning and prioritizing. We have also found that following this convenient 5-step guide saves us time and money along the way.
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