Moving along smartly
Today we have a roof on the new house, complete with feltpaper. That’s one day after the house modules were set on the foundation!
According to my on-site observer, they had eight men working on the roof at once. I wish I had been there to see it. I plan to drive down tomorrow and install a raised hearth for the wood stove.
The workshop roof is shingled so we are making progress on that front also. If you wonder how we keep track of all the bits and pieces, we use very sophisticated, but low-tech project tracking technology.
We maintain one project board for the current house and another for the new house. Each board is covered with sticky notes. Every one of those squares is a task that has to be done by someone.
The big erasable calendar lets us track events we must not miss.
These simple-looking tools give us great control with almost no unnecessary overhead. We can rearrange the schedule by moving or rewriting sticky notes and marking up the erasable calendar. I started out by using MS Project, but I quickly dropped it when I saw that updates were too time-consuming. We update the boards and the schedule every morning over breakfast. It gives us a list of action items for the day and takes no further upkeep.
Moving out smartly
The Smart Move truck arrived on time with five vaults for our possessions. The driver unslung a huge forklift and proceeded to lay the vaults in the driveway according to the pattern I’d requested.
The vaults are clean and rugged and offer all sorts of attachment points to tie furniture in place. They can be securely latched and locked to prevent loss.
We aren’t sure whether we’ll need all five vaults but I am sure that we will fill them up somehow. Too many vaults is a nuisance. Too few vaults is a disaster!
I look at this array and can easily visualize them filled to the top with our possessions. Only 14 more days before we leave this house behind.
The cats know something is up because of the boxes in every room. Buffy is checking them for size. She has been through this several times before and knows it’s never too early to pick out your box.