There is an accepted theorem of IT projects that what starts out as a great idea for better productivity – before the actual ‘Go Live’ moment – will ‘take twice as long, cost twice as much, and be half as effective as expected’… at least prior to the v1.1 release.
A corollary exists in home projects.
Add new hardwood flooring to the living room and that sofa and love seat just don’t seem to work like they did with your carpet. Hire the neighbor’s landscapers to mow your lawn and, by golly, come spring you’ll have them trim the shrubs, add mulch and plant some colorful flowers, too. Go to the Russian River Valley for a wonderful vacation with your spouse and you’re still getting things from the wine clubs you joined 18 months later. Oh, and you needed to buy a wine cooler to hold all those bottles.
OK, maybe that wasn’t ‘you’; it was definitely ‘us’.
The key to not having this happen is simply to increase your planned capital outlay… every time.
That way when you put in a tankless hot water heater and later find out that each year you need a service call to do something to the coils but then the first time he comes he tells you if you’ll add an external water softener then you won’t need to have him back as long as you add salt every three months to the large black container that’s visible from your street and you just know your HOA is going to make you plant a shrub in front of it because of deed restrictions and then it turns out you actually go through salt in six weeks so you make a lot of trips to Home Depot then carry two 40-pound bags from your driveway to the opposite corner of your house.
Of course, that would never happen to ‘you’… just ‘us’.
