Saturday, March 6, 2010

My brother was right.

Back in the day when we did some renovation on a couple of houses, and even before that when I was a carpenter, and even before that when I was part of Smith and Propert Contractors, I learned that things take longer than you would expect, especially when fixing things.When my brother, Franklin, and I worked together on our houses on Vine St. in Richmond, I figured that you could count on a project taking about twice the amount of time that you estimated.  But Franklin disagreed, and over the years, I think his way of estimating work time is spot on.  He figured that I was partly right.  You have to double the amount of time that you first estimated.  But the important part is that you then have to square it.
Case in point.  Today we received the new gasket that goes on the top of our living room slide.  The old one got loose so it needed to be replaced.  No biggie.  It's just a piece of rubber with little metal teeth that hold it in place.  You open the slide a little, push the gasket up onto the flange, cut off the ends and voila, new seal.  I figured, oh, maybe 45  minutes with a nice break.  Nope, 3 hours later, with bruises on our ribs from lying on the RV roof and half the skin scraped off my knuckles from trying to pry the gasket onto the flange, IT"S STILL NOT DONE!  So tomorrow, assuming my hands have recovered some strength, we'll go back up on the roof and try to finish it.  I'm really looking forward to that.
I'm estimating just another hour...

1 comment:

  1. The trick is to always estimate 1/2 an hour. That way, after you double it to 1 hour, the square is still only 1 hour.

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