Know when its OK to leave it OK
When you remodel, it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting everything to be perfect. You have pride in your work and you rightly want it to show. So, when you remodel your house, you want to demonstrate your skill and infinite good taste. This can go to crazy extremes. Once, I was working designing and remodeling a humble 1910 house. Like many house from this era, it was built rather “informally” i.e., nobody must have owned a framing square. The house looked fine, but on closer inspection the entire house was slightly out-of-square.
From a practical standpoint, this was imperceptible. An old house being out-of-square three inches doesn’t really matter. The lead carpenter however had a different idea. He saw leaving the house as is and not correcting this as an affront to his craftsmanship and reputation. If this was his own house, then yes go ahead and address it but as it wasn’t and was being improved for resale, just leave it. Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be and countless hours were spent trying to fix this problem. The end result creating no tangible value for the project.
BuildSmart take away: know when it’s OK to leave it OK.
When you remodel, it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting everything to be perfect. You have pride in your work and you rightly want it to show. So, when you remodel your house, you want to demonstrate your skill and infinite good taste. This can go to crazy extremes. Once, I was working designing and remodeling a humble 1910 house. Like many house from this era, it was built rather “informally” i.e., nobody must have owned a framing square. The house looked fine, but on closer inspection the entire house was slightly out-of-square.
From a practical standpoint, this was imperceptible. An old house being out-of-square three inches doesn’t really matter. The lead carpenter however had a different idea. He saw leaving the house as is and not correcting this as an affront to his craftsmanship and reputation. If this was his own house, then yes go ahead and address it but as it wasn’t and was being improved for resale, just leave it. Unfortunately, this wasn’t to be and countless hours were spent trying to fix this problem. The end result creating no tangible value for the project.
BuildSmart take away: know when it’s OK to leave it OK.
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