Has anyone used LB to manage home renovation/construction?

So what we have, so far, might be a renovation project framework that looks like:

Build real estate investment portfolio
-Buy <property>
--Get soil tested

-Manage <property> renovation project
--Meeting with contractor (with date)

-Renovate
--Living Room (keep your punch down lists organized by room and type of work needed to be done for the walk through during meeting with contractor)
----Walls
----Floors
----Electrical
----hardware and fixtures
-------get cabinet legs (place = at the Cabinet Leg Warehouse)
-------get specialty hinges (place = Hinge-a-rama)
-------pick out drapes (place = Celebrity Drapes)
--Kitchen
----Walls
----Floors
----Electrical
----Appliances

-Sell or rent <property>
--Prep to sell
----Get paint
------paint walls beige
------paint trim white
------paint insides of closets

Seems to me, that the "prep to sell" section might go under the "walls" in each room.

I would think that the Sell might include the marketing and showing the house ...as another way of handling that?

And that the Buy section might also include all the paperwork, purchase and sales agreements, and scheduling inspection and closing details?

Obviously the "cabinet legs" stuff will vary according to the specifics of the project.

I helped my aunt and uncle renovate their first house. That was one of my first summer jobs. Tile... a lot of tile. :-)

I've put that much into an exchange file for you to get started... we can refine it further if we get more ideas posted.

You can find that under Resources on the web site. Here's a direct link to it.

http://www.llamagraphics.com/resources/exchange%20files/index.html

Best wishes,

--Catherine--*
Catherine E. White
President
www.llamagraphics.com
Creators of Life Balance software
for Palm OS, Macintosh and Windows.

I'm not ignoring your suggestion, Catherine; I just wanted to let the OP chime in again to get a better sense of his particular needs. I didn't want to get too far off on a tangent.

I started out with an extensive plan similar to what you did above, but so many unexpected situations presented themselves along the way that I stripped it down to a much simpler skeleton, fleshing it out day by day as things progressed.

One problem that presents itself on a big project like this is that various parts of it are sort of, but not entirely, sequential. You might think of the basic order of operations and come up with something like this...

--Remodel Kitchen
----Design future kitchen
----Gut Kitchen
----Modify framing as necessary (move walls and windows, etc.)
----Rough plumbing and electrical
----Drywall, prime, paint
----Install flooring
----Install cabinetry and countertops
----Finish plumbing and electrical
----Install backsplash tile
----Install appliances

However, even though the project must finally come together in an order very similar to that, many of those stages involve preparatory tasks that can or must happen well ahead of time, so these steps actually overlap each other. For example, cabinetry might take weeks or months to procure, so Order Cabinets, which might seem like a subtask of Install Cabinetry and Countertops, actually needs to happen far earlier.

My solution was to use the 'subtasks in order' feature to make only the first subtask of Remodel Kitchen active at any given time. Rather than letting that first subtask have a name that referred to a particular stage of the project, I just gave it the generic name "ACTIVE," and dragged or created specific subtasks into it. The primary subtask of the ACTIVE section would always be the next major stage of the project, but during periodic reviews of my LB outline, I'd also add preparatory tasks for future stages of the project so they'd show up in my to-do lists as well. On day one things might look like...

--Remodel Kitchen (subtasks in order)
----ACTIVE
------Design future kitchen
------Choose and order appliances
------Research cabinet choices
----Gut Kitchen
----etc.

A little later it might evolve to...

--Remodel Kitchen (subtasks in order)
----ACTIVE
------Gut Kitchen
------Order Cabinets, light fixtures, windows
----Modify framing as necessary (move walls and windows, etc.)
----etc.

Anyhow, I find I inevitably encounter many unforseeable problems and opportunities. I generally think of my starting project outline as a horizon, which I can aim at even without seeing it in great detail.