Today we are talking about a topic which has immense ramifications on the ability to execute on our grand dreams – i.e., Planning

We are  not just building a cob house on the land. We are also putting down a vegetable and fruit garden, installing bee-hives and composting garden waste. We only have 3 months in 2016 and that will be spent on clearing the land; making tool purchases, collecting rocks from the land, understanding the building codes, getting the well dug and simply getting into the swing of regular documentation (the bane of every engineer!) and physical activity on the land over weekends. 2017 will be spent on building and planting the vegetable garden (including flowering plants and herbs), planting fruit trees, installing bee-hives, learning through the county extension programs and the Forest Stewardship programs, design and construction of a test house, detailed design of the main house, submission and hopefully approval of the building plans/permits. Whew! That’s a lot of work! 2018 is when the real action begins where we get the foundation of the house done, septic installed and get the cob walls of the house built.  Further plans would depend on how the building proceeds in 2018 and we will work on those details as the project progresses.

We have used a Google calendar to carve out times for different activities. Our project is no doubt complicated, difficult and lengthy. Breaking down the project into individual activities and assigning a rough timeline achieves a number of things.

  • One really starts to understand the scale of the project and the large number of tasks involved
  • Monitoring progress against the plan helps us understand our progress
  • This plan helps us to tie in to our budget and indirectly gives us a good idea about our spending patterns
  • It can also help us understand the times of higher activity and building which in turn would help us schedule vacation time for the same
  • Breaking the project into individual tasks makes the prospect of execution less daunting
  • The process of planning and thinking aloud helps us understand any dependencies or pre-requisites and helps us order interdependent tasks in the right sequence
  • It helps us understand the kind of flexibility that our schedule permits including tasks that can be juggled around
  • The more detailed the plan; the less the chance for failure.  Additional time spent on intelligent planning and detailed design will save us a lot of time and heartbreak in the future once the actual construction starts

We have recorded a small talk on our thinking process for outlining this plan. Ignore my comment about the talk being relatively short! We seem to end up jabbering away for at least 15 minutes in most of our videos.