Becoming a Better Estimator

I’m a big believer in DIY. Part of the reason I love doing things myself is because it satiates my curiosity for learning how things work — no better way to truly understand something until you’ve experienced it. Secondly, I’m frugal — if there’s something that I can do well-enough, saves me hundreds or thousands of dollars, and all it costs me is time and mental frustration, then I’m all in. Although I love the challenge of learning to do something new, a major flaw I have is always underestimating the amount of time I need to complete a project. This really irks me because I feel like it shouldn’t be hard to come up with an accurate estimate so creating better estimates is something I’m trying to become better at.

The current project I’m working on is redoing the electrical wiring in my garage. This includes adding a subpanel so that I can bring in 240v service for my woodworking tools. At this point I would say I’m about 50% done; with the help of my father-in-law I have been able to dig a trench and run four spools of 6 gauge cable through conduit from the basement to the detached garage. We have also finished connecting the new subpanel and wiring in the changes to the main panel in the basement. We flipped the breakers on last night and they didn’t flip off and nothing caught on fire — great success!

With that said, we experienced a lot of speed bumps along the way. My original estimate for getting all of these tasks done was one weekend (har har). In total, it probably took three weekends. Here are a list of hang-ups that I did not expect going in:

· Researching in the store — debating metal vs. plastic conduit, what size conduit, what fittings we will need. This should have done beforehand.

· Needing to go back to the store and buy bigger conduit — although four 6 gauge wires should theoretically fit in .75” conduit, good luck pulling it easily.

· Drilling the hole in the foundation to get the conduit into the basement took an entire day. Finding a hole saw bit in the size we needed was difficult, and then actually drilling through the brick without an impact drill took some time.

· Pulling the wire through the conduit. This took an extremely long time and we had to give it four or five attempts. Things that helped were taping the wires together, wire lube, and taking a step back to think about problems we encountered instead of trying to pull the wires by force.

· Trying to find a 50amp main breaker when only 100amp ones exist for the type of panel I thought. Eventually found out we can just use a 50amp breaker in the first two slots and wire the feeder cables into that, but we still spent lots of time researching and searching for a 100amp main breaker.

· Running back and forth to the store at least 10 times for miscellaneous adapters, fittings, and caulk.

I’m hoping that by writing about these unforeseen difficulties, I will do a better job in the future of estimating how long it will take me to do a project. My wife’s general rule is to multiply whatever I tell her by at least four — if I think something is going to take me a day or two to complete, in her mind that means it’s going to take me all week. The remaining 50% of the project involves rewiring the existing circuitry in the garage — easy stuff. Here I am writing out what I think needs to be done in advance, as well as my estimate of how long it will take. Once I finish, I’ll come back and we’ll see how close my estimate was to reality:

· Research and design locations of new circuits: 2 days.

· Mid-project cleaning up: .5 day.

· Go buy new boxes, receptacles, switches, breakers, and conduit: .5 day.

· Remove existing wiring from receptacles and switches so it can be reused: 2 days.

· Remove existing switches and receptacle boxes: 1 day.

· Remove existing lights and hang up lights in new locations: 2 days.

· Install receptacles and switches in their planned locations: 1 day.

· Wire receptacles and switches: 4 days.

· Clean up: 1 day.

So all together it should only take 2–3 days ;). I’ll keep track of my results and report back so we can see how well I did.