For the past 2 years, I have been working on renovating our house. One of the things that I did to make sure that this was a smooth renovation was to create a plan. You can find it here. The plan included everything from how much we planned on spending, how long it should take, where we were going to start and what tools would be needed.
When I came up with the plan, my wife and I were getting ready to go to bed so this meant that I had to take care of all of the planning without her. Yes, she wanted input into what we were going to do, but she also knew that it wasn’t going to be an easy task either way. When I finally came up with the plan, I told her about it. She was happy with it as was I. The plan seemed to be working just fine up until we got to this part: “Draw up a budget!”
I don’t know if you have ever tried to draw up a budget before, but it is hard enough doing it yourself, let alone trying to get your other half on the same page. My wife and I had talked about what we thought were reasonable costs in the beginning, but as soon as I sat down with her to draw up a budget, she started trying to tell me why we shouldn’t be doing this or that part of the plan.
We ended up fighting for over an hour before my wife finally gave in (no wonder it took 2 years). I was surprised though because when people hear about our renovation story they usually treat us like heroes. They ask us how we managed to renovate a house while keeping it cheap (since we’re engineers) or they think that what we did is impossible since no one has time for renovations between work and family commitments. It’s nice that we get the recognition, but nobody ever stops to talk about why we were fighting over a budget.
After all this time, I think my wife is finally starting to see the importance of creating a plan and sticking with it. She just started really getting into cooking so after drawing up her own food shopping list she seems much happier now that she can make sure buying items will fit into our weekly budget for groceries. The moral of this story is: If you want to renovate your home or do anything big in life, make a plan and stick with it as much as possible. Don’t let anyone tell you what you should be doing because at the end of the day only you know what’s best!